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

part-time effort. 
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transforms the world into one simple choice:
Will you? Or won’t you?
#2) FREEDOM FROM SCARCITY AND FISCAL CONSTRAINT

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In early 2014, I dropped seven figures-plus on a beautiful home in Fountain
Hills, Arizona. I could do a “cribs” video and talk about its many great amenities,
but doing so is tantamount to 
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douchebaggery. Instead, I’d like to talk
about what it doesn’t have…
It doesn’t have a mortgage. I told the bank “fuck you” and paid cash. Outside
of maintenance and operating expenses, such as insurance and utilities, my basic
living expenses can be paid with an income considered poverty in most states.
No rent payment, no mortgage payment, no interest payment, no private
mortgage insurance—never again, for life.
Likewise, it doesn’t have cars in the garage with payments attached. I don’t
need leases or loans. Nope, whatever cars are parked are paid for. Some have
tremendous miles and make no statements in traffic other than that I need to get
from point A to point B. Others may come and go and are very expensive,
Italian, rarely driven, and symbolic of the 
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path I’ve taken. What
would your life look like without a house or a car payment?
And my favorite feature of homeownership? My home is free from the
Gestapo HOA, better known as your trusty neighborhood homeowners’
association. If you’re not familiar with HOAs, they are composed of multiple
jackasses posing as humans, telling you what you can and cannot do with your
house. Want to paint your house? You need permission. Fly a flag on your front
steps? Permission. Don’t get permission and get fined or, worse, have a lien
slapped on your house. I cannot tell you how happy I am knowing some loser cut
from the varsity football team forty years ago can’t tell me the appropriate trim
height for my bushes.
But perhaps my favorite liberation is escaping the financial straitjacket while
giving scarcity the middle finger, including the authors and bloggers who pitch
it. Ah, the beauty of not being mind-fucked by money. It means dinner is a nice
steak found at a nice steakhouse—not roadkill you found on Interstate 10. It
means liberated shopping at “Whole Paycheck” with smug impunity, price and
sale considerations ignored—not hauling a wad of coupons so thick that George
Costanza would drop his jaw. It means flushing the toilet every shit—not
rationing flushes every six dumps because, OMG, you’ll save eighty-nine cents
on every flush! And my favorite: the exhilaration of walking into Starbucks and
buying whatever you want without hearing lectures about compound-interest
tables and how much that five-buck coffee would grow if you just saved it while
waiting for the invention of warp-drive.

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#3) FREEDOM FROM HYPERREALISTIC INFLUENCE
One day I climbed into my truck and caught a glimpse of some papers
jammed in between the seat and the center console. Now, if you ever hitched a
ride in my car, you’d conclude that I’m a slob, or at least, I chauffeur one. Riding
shotgun is like box seats at the county landfill without the Cracker Jack. Anyway,
after starting the engine and lifting an eyebrow at the trash in my passenger well,
some official-looking papers caught my eye. I grabbed them and took a look.
OMG. What I found was an emotional mixed bag: First, shock, then happiness,
and then fear. Buried in those papers, buried in my car was a check for $11,000.
The check sat lost in my car for weeks, not cashed, not missed, and not needed.
Shocking? Yes. Happy? You bet. I can’t tell you how incredible it is to be debt-
free without need, want, or desire. The fear? The check totally slipped my mind.
Alzheimer’s is a family friend, and let’s just say, my memory rivals a Commodore
64.
The takeaway? Had I been bewitched by the consumer hyperreality, that
$11G would have been spent the minute it hit my hands. If my priority was
slaughtering the Joneses or some flamboyant Instagram playboy, I would have
spent my millions on a bunch of junk that screamed, “Hey, look at me and my
cool stuff!” The lesson is, I haven’t pissed away my freedom playing the
consumer con game. I didn’t capitulate to the latest in German engineering and
didn’t buy the latest iPhone only to have it replaced a year later. Instead, that
$11K was parked in a seat crevasse and never thought about again.
Perhaps my favorite hyperrealistic immunity is from trivial distraction. In
June of 2014, Yahoo’s front page announced that breakout pop star Iggy Azalea’s
video “Fancy” surpassed a hundred million views. At the same time, sectarian
war broke out in Iraq. Ukraine was on the verge of a Russian invasion. And yet,
Yahoo had nary a peep. As for the urgent matters that besiege the American
idiocracy, namely Iggy’s hundred million views, I’m proud to admit I was not
one of them. The very definition of 
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means not being influenced
by 
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trivialities. Pop culture, celebrity worship, and pro athletes are “no
contest” to the life I’m leading.
For example, ask me who won the World Series last year. I don’t know. And
if you told me, I wouldn’t remember. Why? Because I don’t give a fuck. I don’t
care that some millionaire athlete threw an interception and lost the football
game in the fourth quarter. While I respect pro athletes for their process, I pay
attention to their livelihoods as much as they pay attention to mine. My life is too

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short, too important, and too valuable to get wrapped up in 
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zombification.
And finally, another hyperrealistic immunity is its bullshit detector. You see,
when Dillion, a long-lost friend, sends me a Facebook message crusading for
some “ground-floor opportunity” that’s gonna make him rich, the BS
thermometer spits mercury. His words are peppered with phony platitudes,
excited emoticons, and stories of free BMWs that aren’t really free but leased.
Funny and sad, but no worries—I’m immune because I know the difference
between entrepreneurship and a direct sales job in a network marketing
company. I know the difference between leading the charge and being led by a
charge. I know the difference between the 
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seeking shortcuts and the
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targeting those seeking shortcuts.
But my 
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immunity doesn’t end there. Rid of influence, I’m a
human shield impervious to 
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dogmatisms and their ubiquity. It’s like
walking the planet uninfected amidst a zombie pandemic.
Oh gracious, look there: Another financial article authored by a non-
millionaire telling me how to become a millionaire. In the 
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Xanadu,
it’s perfectly acceptable, like taking fitness advice from a fat dude who hasn’t seen
a gym since the Bush administration. But the fairy tales and unicorns have just
started. Look, its another financial guru dispensing another fiscal hypocrisy of
“do what I say, not what I do.” I chuckle. I shake my head. And then my
humanity hits me with sadness—people buy the lies and pay for it with their
lives.
#4) FREEDOM FROM HOPE AND DEPENDENCE
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means unbinding from hope and dependence as a financial
plan.
It’s a simple truth: “Fuck you” freedoms cannot be ascribed by dependence or
hope. The source is irrelevant. Living in your parent’s house? Dependent. Living
off the government’s nipple? Dependent. Is your lifestyle tied to a job and the
income it provides? Sorry, dependent. Is your retirement locked into a fifty-year
marriage with Wall Street? Or how well the stock market performs? Again, sorry
—dependent.
Within the 
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OS, the holy trinity of retirement planning is tied to
three unpredictable and uncontrollable markets: the job market, the stock
market, and the housing market. In other words, follow the 
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and your

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financial future is resigned to the gambles of dependence. 
Adopt conventional
thinking in this area and I guarantee, you will live conventionally.
The truth is, the 
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don’t rely on these markets for creating
wealth. Nope, none of them. Less than 2 percent of my net worth comes
compliments of any of these markets. As I write this, I own a few stocks, and it’s
only because they pay dividends. Being free from market shenanigans means
something I hold very dear: I can give them the big “fuck you.” Stock market up?
Down? Who the hell cares! I don’t give a shit because the stock market is not my
vehicle for wealth. And the ultimate irony? I don’t own an IRA or a 401(k)—
traditionally espoused retirement vehicles—and yet I retired decades early. Oh
lord, how could that be? You see, the 
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understand the difference
between the uncontrollable limited leverage (depend on the job/stock/housing
market for decades and pray to God) and controllable unlimited leverage (invest
in a business system I create and control).
#5) FREEDOM FROM ORDINARY
A final 
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liberation is to be pardoned from the death sentence of
ordinary and routine. As I mentioned, one of my meaningless jobs after college
was driving limousines in the Chicago suburbs. While that sounds glamorous, it
wasn’t. The only difference between me and a taxi driver was six feet of legroom,
a shelf full of liquor, and a privacy door, or as I call it, the porn door. Anyhow,
this “meaningless” job wasn’t so meaningless after all. For most days, I partook
in the race of rats, with me as their driver. I saw routine on a daily basis.
One of my usual customers was an executive who would fly out Monday
morning and return Thursday night. Despite driving this man nearly every week,
we rarely spoke other than trip-pertinent information. Rarely a greeting, never a
conversation, only a word or two, sometimes sprinkled in with a nod. Misery and
scorn etched his morning face whenever I picked him up at his Barrington
mansion. During rides to the airport, chats on his brick phone were occasional,
the conversations callous, sometimes ruthless.
Then one Monday morning after I picked him up, something different
happened. 
He broke routine.
He actually engaged me in a cheerful conversation.
He learned I had two business degrees and was an aspiring entrepreneur. I
learned he was a lawyer with a wife and two kids. During the thirty-minute drive
to the airport, I wondered, “Why now is Mr. Misery talking to me?” As I drove
into the airport, I found out why: he was meeting his wife and kids in Hawaii for
vacation.

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Welcome to routine—err, I should say, breaking routine.
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is liberation from cultural norms and patterns of existence
that don’t serve your happiness. Such patterns are the traffic commute: the ride
on the bus, the train, or the drive in the car. The nine to five, Monday through
Friday, and the Sunday blues scarred by foreboding and discontent. The once-a-
year vacation, the one that finally allows you to break, speak to a stranger, and
crack a smile. The daily routine of waking up at 5:00 a.m. to a song you once
loved, knotting a tie, working as you’re told, driving home, microwaving dinner,
watching the latest flavor of reality TV, and then repeating endlessly till your
funeral.
Freedom from ordinary releases you from the cognitive clutter of 
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standards by which you are measured: your car, your job, your college degrees,
your house, your social media posts, and yes, even your appearance. If you’re one
of the 5,000 people that follow me on my personal Facebook page, you’ll notice
something unusual: I rarely post anything. No politics, religion, or sports team
crap. No gym photos or pictures of my healthy meal. The truth is, I care more
about the real me than a crafted, social media me—so real me gets my attention.
In a similar vein, when you’re unbound from ordinary, societal norms can’t
tell you how to dress or groom. 
You own your own style.
As I write this, my hair
is halfway down my back. Yes, it’s that long and I haven’t lost it.
“Madam…can I get you a drink?”
I hear that a lot when I dine out. From behind, I’ve been mistaken for a
woman. When the server faces me and sees a man, hilarity ensues. The girlfriend
finds it amusing. I don’t. The point is, I haven’t cut my hair because I don’t need
to cut my hair. There’s no employee handbook I have to follow, giving me the
freedom to roll like Axl Rose, minus the shrilly voice and goofy hip gyrations.
Likewise, I don’t own a tie—why would I waste money on something I hate
wearing? Heck, I don’t even own an expensive shirt. My day-to-day attire is gym
clothes. The last time I had a public speaking gig? I showed up in jeans and a T-
shirt. I wear what’s comfortable. If the audience wants to ignore me because my
shoes aren’t Ferragamo and my suit isn’t Armani, well that audience would be in
the wrong room and listening to the wrong speaker.
The 
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TLDR? Do, wear, buy, live, and pursue whatever you
want. It’s a beautiful way to live. But, will you even make it to the starting line?
Let’s find out.

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