Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

The 14 Productivity Hacks of Elon Musk!
9 Life Tips from Steve Jobs
12 Super-Secrets of the Super-Rich!
While the above stories might have interesting and useful information,
you’re getting only a minor, fragmented story behind the success. How much?
I’d say about 1 percent of it. And yet, because of the narrative fallacy, you will
misattribute it to much more—30, 50, 70 percent—and the next thing you know,
you’re jumping off a rooftop.
I witness the narrative fallacy and receive “pill requests” practically every day
at my inbox. Email after email, someone messages me asking for critical, life-
altering advice, as if I know the right answer:
Do I quit my job and start a business?
Should I quit the military after five years?
Do I drop out of college?
My wife is the ultimate Slowlaner; do I divorce her?
Do I wipe my ass with my left or right hand?
Let me get this straight…you want me, a stranger on the other side of the
planet, to decide one of your most important life decisions based on a paragraph
written in forty-five seconds? It’s ridiculous, and yet it happens daily.

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Podium popping’s consequence is that it makes you think you can retread
someone’s story into your own. It makes you think that because “X worked for
him; X will work for me.” The first issue with this thought line is it disrespects
time and circumstance.
For example, the specific steps I used to start a company twenty years ago are
absolutely irrelevant today. Social media didn’t exist. Neither did the phrase
“two-sided marketplace.” I had to drag my butt down to the public library and
find paying customers by scouring the nationwide Yellow Pages. Do Yellow
Pages even exist anymore? Likewise, the strategies and tactics I used to start my
business forum in 2007 would also be vastly different today. Publishing a book in
2010 versus 2016? Again, different. The point I’m making is this: You and I are
in the same boat. If I wanted to start and succeed with a new project, I would not
be as advantaged as you think. 
New successes blaze new roads; they don’t trail old
ones.
Another problem with podium popping and the God-like worship of success
tidbits is it presumes people are homogeneous, when in fact, we’re all unique
based on countless variables: genetics, personalities, education, upbringing,
experience, management style, leadership style, financial resources, network
associates, and culture are just a few qualities that make cherry-picked strategy
practically worthless.
I have tremendous respect for Steve Jobs’s entrepreneurial accomplishments,
and yet by many accounts, the guy was a first-class douchebag: parking his
Mercedes in handicapped spots, humiliating employees, and throwing tantrums
when he didn’t get his way.
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Shall we presume any of these negative traits
accounted for Jobs’s iconic success? And if so, shall we now aspire for
douchebaggery, considering it might be responsible for a legendary company like
Apple? I hope not.
We’re all perfectly imperfect. Including our heroes. While doing X, Y, and Z
might have worked for Jobs, it might not work for YOU. Every one of us needs to
stop hero-worshiping mortal beings and be our own heroes. Be a hero to your
wife, to your family, and to your children. Stop trying to write your story with
someone else’s pen and, instead, start using your own.
SURVIVAL SPOTLIGHTING: FAILURES KEEP THEIR MOUTHS CLOSED
Billionaire Lonny Leaper says the secret to success is jumping off a building.
He’s a living testament to that advice. And unfortunately, he’s also a living

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testament to the next psychological trap you’ll encounter on your journey:
survival spotlighting.
Survival spotlighting, which is similar to podium popping, is when you focus
on the survivors of some process because they’re showcased, while overlooking
those who are not, usually due to lack of visibility, and hence, you come to an
inaccurate conclusion.
After Lonny dispenses his landmark advice, “Jump off a building,” thousands
of people jump off buildings and die as a consequence. And since we can’t hear
from those who have leaped and died, the media reports them as suicides, and
life goes on. However, if the dead could talk, they’d expose the truth: this is the
worst advice ever voiced; success was my intent—not suicide.
This is how survival spotlighting works—a survivor of some process is rolled
out to a stage and dispenses glorious survivor advice. What don’t you hear
about? Everyone else that follows the same advice and has failed at it, is failing, or
will fail. A lottery has millions of invisible losers, and yet, one winner rises to the
podium and is photographed and congratulated. When your buddy wins in
Vegas, he’s bragging on Facebook; losses are sequestered and replaced with
pictures of the Bellagio fountain instead.
Behind survival spotlighting is the logic error, 
the survivor bias
. And like the
life-or-death consequences of the leaper syndrome, the survivor bias’s discovery
also has its origins in life-or-death circumstance.
During World War II, Abraham Wald and his colleagues were
commissioned by the government to study long-range bombers, a notoriously
high-risk job for pilots of the day. Their sole task? Figure out how to keep more
bombers and their pilots in the sky.
The research started with simple observation. After a bomber returned from
enemy territory, it was examined for damage. Data were graphed for each
surviving plane. After a while, a pattern emerged. The common damage clusters
always occurred in the tail-gunner area, the middle underbody, and the wings.
Riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, Wald’s colleagues concluded that these
were the most vulnerable parts of the plane and should be reinforced with extra
armor. Conversely, the front and rear undersides of the planes hosted little or no
damage and, they reasoned, shouldn’t be modified. Wald, a mathematician by
trade, interrupted the groupthink and theorized the opposite. Can you see why?
Wald argued that the damage clusters exhibited strength—not weakness—
revealing exactly where the bombers could be hit and still survive the flight
home. He added further that the most vulnerable areas of the plane were where

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there was no damage—those areas needed reinforcement because planes
exhibiting those damage clusters were blown out of the sky, not surviving the
flight home.
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The Navy listened and reinforced the correct parts of the plane,
more pilots survived, we won the war, and yes, the survivor bias was born.
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Fast-forward seven decades and the survivor bias has not only survived but
thrived.
Take for example the compound-interest scam described in Chapter 25. It’s
predicated on survival spotlighting. Millions play the Wall Street casino for
wealth, and few live to enjoy it. Those who do are spotlighted and hero-
worshipped on the front page of Yahoo Finance. Behind the miraculous tale, you
find a Lonny Leaper: a lifetime employee who hasn’t suffered a job crunch or
unexpected layoff for forty years; a man who never dealt with a health crisis or an
ugly divorce; a man who had foresight to “sell” in 1999 and 2008, and “buy” in
2002 and 2010; a man who hasn’t vacationed or dined-out in decades. Yes, just a
caged, experience starved existence barred by a job, a shack, and an obsessive
relationship with money and a retirement date that may never come. In other
words, you hear about a man whose epitaph shall read, “Here lies Bob: a man
who lived poor but died rich.”
Here’s another tale proving compound interest’s survivor bias: I recently read
a story fronting Business Insider, which told the miraculous tale of a thirty-year-
old millionaire who was currently succeeding the Slowlane via a deprivation-
and-saving strategy. This article also mentioned my 
Fastlane
strategy, implying
that it was BS because this poor guy was succeeding a Slowlane. This man also
mentioned that his astonishing story was featured in 
The New York Times
, on
Business Insider, and in various other media outlets.
Duh, ya think?
These results are so rare, so miraculous, so “outlier” that they're newsworthy
and belong in the pages of an international newspaper. However, you know what
stories aren't featured in 
The New York Times
?
Multimillionaire entrepreneurs who retire forty years early and live lavishly,
not because of Wall Street, experiential starvation or mind-numbing frugality,
but because they provided massive value. Hmm, maybe I should knickname
myself “Money MJ” or “Dollar DeMarco”?
But these stories never make the front page of some financial website because
it simply isn’t unusual
. Notably, a penny-pinching millionaire is newsworthy—an
affluent entrepreneur living large is not—and such might incite the masses.

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Behind the extraordinary survival stories are the walking wounded: the
people who have been living Wall Street’s fairy tale and are treading failure.
That’s Walter and Helen in Sun City, who lost half their retirement portfolio in
the 2008 crash. Financial advisors told them, “Be patient—the markets will
bounce back.” Unfortunately, Walter and Helen don’t have the luxury of
patience; their story didn’t make it into 
Kiplinger’s
but instead made 
Sun City
Independent’s
back-page obituaries; they died early, “waiting” for the markets to
bounce back. So much for that European cruise they wanted to take.
Then there’s your average middle-class, middle-aged worker who’s been
saving diligently, but not enough, because the stinking job market hasn’t given a
competitive salary opportunity. Or the capital markets aren’t yielding 10 percent
as promised by Utopian Charts. For him, compound interest is a mortal
impossibility unless he lives to 130 years old or starts making $500,000 a year.
He’ll never retire and will work until death. Where’s his story?
In fact, where are all the baby-boomer millionaires and billionaires? If
compound interest was so effective, those nearing retirement should be set for
life! And yet, they’re not.
According to Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at The New
School for Social Research, 75 percent of Americans approaching retirement age
in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts.
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Seventy-five
freaking percent! This begs the question: If 75 percent can barely scrape up and
invest 30Gs, how much do the other 25 percent have? Think they’re all
millionaires?
Of course not!
The median saved in this outlier group is a mere $55K; the average amount is
barely $110K. Smell the smoking gun yet?
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This data disrobes the emperor:
Survivors of compound interest and its ridiculous demands on savings and
frugality are probably less than 1 percent. And yet the sky continues to rain
leapers.
MOMENTUM PARALYSIS: WHY YOU CAN’T MOVE DESPITE MOVEMENT
Ever hear the phrase “throwing good money after bad”?
How about “only dead fish go with the flow”?
These statements best describe the next 
UNSCRIPTED
battle fought,
momentum paralysis
. Momentum paralysis is not about immobility but being
unable to depart from your current course of action. It is our tendency to allow
momentum, or flow, to carry us through life rather than making proactive

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decisions, which are decidedly better for our future, even when those decisions
have painful or uncomfortable attachments.
For example, several years ago, I read 
Fifty Shades of Grey
, which probably
ranks as one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Anyway, as an author, I was
curious about the book. Seriously. With all the hype and hoopla, throwing
women in a tizzy and banking millions, the book warranted an investigation.
Several chapters into the book, I concluded a sulfuric acid bath would have been
more pleasurable. Paragraph after paragraph, I found myself mimicking the
Jackie Chan Internet meme, WTF. How many more times do I need to hear
about Christian’s gray eyes? His tousled hair? And her juvenile reaction to it?
And yet, despite the 
Fifty Shades of Literary Torture
I was suffering, guess what? I
finished the damn book.
As you can see, momentum paralysis keeps you attached to the same poor
decision when the right decision is to stop, reverse course, or let it go. Behind our
reversing inability is a fear of loss. In my 
Fifty Shades
example, I continued
reading because I didn’t want to feel I wasted two hours of my time. So I wasted
three more thinking it would get better. I also continued reading because of
FOMO—I didn’t want to miss out. Was there literary genius lurking later in the
book? A shocking plot curve curing its ills and explaining its Louvre-worthy
reverence? Unfortunately, redemption never came—just more tousled hair and
piercing gray eyes.
Momentum paralysis is why people lose fortunes in the stock market.
When you pay one hundred dollars for some hot stock shares, say
eToys.com
, and then it drops to eighty dollars, oh no, you can’t be wrong, can
you!? So you buy more at eighty dollars. Then it goes to fifty dollars and, yet
again, you buy more. And then you repeat this insanity all the way to zero.
Behind your rationale was not stubbornness but righteousness and your desire
not to miss the great gains that surely will be forthcoming.
Are you in a soul-destroying relationship that needs to end? Momentum
paralysis will keep you in it until you address the paralysis and the illogical
excuses that keep you there.