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

Wannabe Entrepreneur:
I want those beautiful roses blooming across the river.
Can you help me get them?
MJ:
Sure, but crossing the raging river isn’t easy or quick. Ready to learn?
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
Meh, just give me the roses.
MJ:
Huh?
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
You’ve already crossed the river; just give me your big
boat; or better yet, just give me the roses.

---

MJ:
Uhh…ever heard about learning to fish versus given a fish?
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
Fishing? Rivers? I don’t care about this stuff and I am only
interested in the roses. I've seen many Instagram posts where people flaunt their
roses and they sound glorious. Do you think I can PayPal $997 to my favorite
Internet marketing guru and get the "super-secret" for them roses?
MJ:
Sigh
. If you want the roses, you need to learn how to cross the river yourself.
There aren’t any shortcuts. I can give you the blueprint for crossing but you’re
going to need tools, hammers, wood, nails, and some other things, so you can
build a system for crossing. It might take some time to find and learn these tools,
but trust me, once you cross, the roses are incredible! It’s worth the effort.
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
This doesn't sound fun or easy, and it’s not my passion. I
want to do what I love. How about this ice cream cone I’m eating? I love it and I’m
passionate about it. Will stuffing my face with it help me get the roses?
MJ:
Huh? What does your ice cream have to do with the roses or the river that
stops you from getting them?
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
Mmmm…but I love this ice cream cone.
MJ:
{furrows brow} Did you hear anything I just said?
Wannabe Entrepreneur:
{looks up from his cone, face smothered in ice cream}
So…can you give me your boat?
In this story, the roses are the event (success) and the raging river is the
obstacle: sacrifices, struggles, and the failures (the process). The advice (the tools)
given don’t sound easy, fun, or quick, so the wannabe focuses on irrelevancies,
namely, a continued search for the tasty event-driven shortcut (give me your
boat, give me cash) underscored by love and passion. And finally, the ice cream
cone is the action-fake—it feels good now; it doesn’t help and is gone in minutes.
POLARIZER: THE PROCESS-PRINCIPLE
My first book took me three years to write. This one nearly three as well. In
both cases, I had urges to quit. Multiple times. I’d write six chapters, read it, and
end it in the shredder. I’d flail my hands in the air and whine like a baby because
my perfectionist mind ruled: It sucks. Sometimes I’d pen my frustrations on my
forum so everyone saw process is not easy. And each time the angst boiled, I set
it aside and reaffirmed to myself that 
if it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it
.
This is what happens when you vacate event idealism and adopt a process-
principle. Frustration and angst, while felt, are squashed. Expectations adjusted

---

from ease to challenge. Obstacles, expected and overcome. And most
important…shit, while not quickly, gets done. Here are nine steps to help you
moving toward the process side of the event/process dichotomy:
1.
Intelligent Awareness
2.
Modify Expectations/Realign Difficulty
3.
Identify and Visualize the Change Target
4.
Apply Mathematics to the Goal
5.
Segment Goal into Its Daily Action
6.
Identify Threats to the Target
7.
Identify the Right Battlefield
8.
Attack Bad Habits with Inconvenience/Pain
9.
Act until Echo
STEP #1: INTELLIGENT AWARENESS TO NEUROLOGICAL DEFAULTS
Obviously, an “intelligent awareness” of event idealism isn’t sweeping the
nation. The diet and weight-loss industry is $60 billion strong.
31
The infomercial
marketing business, $170 billion.
32
The automotive industry, ginormous, more
than $1 trillion, accounting for a whopping 3.5 percent of the country’s entire
GNP (gross national product). Oh, and since you’re reading this book, the self-
improvement business, nearly $11 billion.
33
The sad truth is your brain is not wired for process but for event-oriented
shortcuts intended for efficiency. And it loves assumptions, basing everything on
memories or past reference points. Without our brain’s optimization features,
we’d be no better than a goldfish swimming on instinct. But this mental
efficiency has its exploitive drawbacks. For instance, magicians leverage our
neural bias toward shortcuts and "fill in the blank" gap assumptions. Magic is all
about attention and distraction, using our lazy brains and their cognitive
shortcuts and algorithms against us. Unfortunately, that same neuroscience
giving magicians power also gives the 
SCRIPT
power through event-driven
thinking, putting you on the perennial losing team. This neurological awareness
is the first step toward a process modality.
For example, the best event/process model is our health because it reflects
process preceding progression or regression. That beach babe with the guns of
steel and flat stomach? Process, daily exercise and a disciplined diet entailing
huge sacrifices. The visual result of a fit and healthy body is the event. Likewise,
that fat dude I saw last week at the casino, who ate his way into a wheelchair and
went back to the buffet line six times, is morbidly obese via process: decades of

---

sedentary living and poor dietary decisions. American fatness is a consequence of
event idealism—an eating event feeds our addiction to feel good now, as opposed
to the disciplined process of eating properly and feeling good later.
The next time you go grocery shopping, try 
cart-creeping
—spying into other
people’s shopping carts. Pick any outlier—someone obese or someone fit. Match
their food content in their carts with their body type. More than likely, they’ll be
a perfect match. This exercise gives you the ability to do the impossible: 
you can
witness a process before the process occurs
. By examining someone’s food choices,
you get a sneak peek into their eating habits for the next week. Spot a fit guy and
he will have lean meats, vegetables, and raw, “close to nature” choices. The
person who’d sink a small canoe will have highly processed and sugary foods:
cookies, soda, chips, and whatever else “highs” their now. 
Obesity is a dereliction
of process, while fitness is a testament to it.
Health can’t be shortcutted—bought,
stolen, cheated, bribed, operated on—and it can’t be injected. It must be earned.
Indeed, we are walking advertisements for the event/process dichotomy.
STEP #2: MODIFY EXPECTATIONS AND REALIGN THE SOURCE OF DIFFICULTY
After awareness, the next step is realigning expectations: 
extraordinary results
demand extraordinary efforts
. That means give up the ghost and kill the shortcut
search. Kill the idea that excellence can be accomplished with mediocre effort.
The real difficulty is accepting there is no shortcut. Give up the assumptions
about those who accomplish great things and that their results are automatically
Deus Ex Machina
, not process.
The fact is, people struggle with their goals because they refuse the process-
principle. Jumping from one promised shortcut to another, their 
difficulty is not
related to process, but to the everlasting search for a shortcut that doesn’t exist
.
I just can’t lose any weight!
Oh really?
I’ve known you for two decades and you’ve never hit the gym or eaten
properly. In other words, 
you can’t lose weight because you can’t find the shortcut
to lose weight
. No wonder it’s so difficult! And the research proves America’s
resistance to process and their thirst for shortcuts. According to Marketdata
Enterprises, roughly seventy-five million dieters admit being fickle and simply
shift from fad to fad.
34
Success is simpler than you think: ax the shortcut, honor the process-
principle, and do the necessary work. Dump the diet pills, the fat girdle, and the
fads; eat properly twenty meals out of twenty-one and get your ass to the gym,

---

sprint, play tennis—for the love of God, do freaking something. And wham, you
succeed.
STEP #3: IDENTIFY AND VISUALIZE THE CHANGE TARGET
What exactly do you want?
Envision yourself time-shifting one year into the future at a New Year’s Eve