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

~ Edward de Bono, Psychologist
EASIFICATION: EASY MEANS YOU AIN’T SOLVING JACK
I
magine you live in a bizzaro city with a bizzaro government. In this city, the
government loves restaurants. To incentivize their creation, the city government
will fully subsidize any restaurant proposal. To take advantage of their generous
offer, you stroll into city hall, fill out a form, and bam, here’s your blank check
for your eatery. With the blank check comes an entire “start-up manual” on how
to get your restaurant up and running.
Unfortunately, this government policy has not come without consequence.
As you can guess, the city is jam-packed with restaurants. You can’t walk ten feet
without seeing a restaurant. Every commercial building has one. Every corner.
Heck, even some residential homes are running restaurants out of backyard
garages.
So let me ask you…
Is starting a restaurant in this city a good choice? A gold mine of
opportunity?
Of course the answer is a big fat NO. Hopefully you see the obvious mistake
(and foolishness) of starting a restaurant in a city smothered by restaurants. And
yet, how is this foolishness any different from starting, say, the forty-millionth

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blog? Or joining a network marketing company that has saturated a particular
geographic region? 
The difference is simply visibility.
When Main Street has fifty restaurants and forty-nine of them are empty,
you can see strong supply and weak demand. You can see fierce competition and
limited opportunity. Unfortunately, in the real world, we don’t benefit from such
visibility—unless you know the Commandment of Entry.
The Commandment of Entry identifies poor opportunities and crowded
markets that should be avoided. The Entry Commandment also gives insight
into where real opportunities hide. By definition, 
the Commandment of Entry
states: As entry barriers to any business or start-up process weaken or become
“easified,” so does the strength or the potential of the opportunity.
Simply put, the
easier the opportunity, the worse it is. Conversely, the harder something is to
solve, the greater the opportunity.
In our restaurant example, “easification” occurred when the government
made it super easy and super cheap to open a restaurant. Suddenly, restaurants
are everywhere because entry barriers—namely money, risk, and even experience
—were removed from the creation effort. Anytime getting in business is as

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simple as filling out an online form or doing something so simple that a bum on
a street corner can do it, the red flag of “easification” is flown. When that flutters
in the wind, so flutters the potency of the opportunity signaling an entry
violation.
Easification exposes entry violations and, hence, exposes weak opportunities
overrun with competition and depressed margins. In effect, easification appeals
to entrepreneurs afflicted by the shortcut scam. If business longevity (and
profitability) is your goal, as it should be, your entry barriers represent the
strength of current, and future, competition. Entry barriers represent the
difficulty level in starting your enterprise.
For example, if you want to be the entrepreneur who creates the next
generation of smartphones to compete with the iPhone, the entry barriers—
capital, experience, technical know-how—are gargantuan. Even seasoned
entrepreneurs are excluded from trying because the entry barriers are so strong.
On the flip side, starting a blog takes two hours. A T-shirt business, using any
one of the “print-on-demand” screen printers, takes minutes. While these
ventures might rack up experience points, they probably won’t rack up millions.
Here are just a few “business ventures” that stink of easification:
Blogging/forums
Self-publishing/writing
T-shirt businesses
Network marketing
Affiliate marketing
Selling on Amazon based on some Amazon guru course
A recent example of easification comes from the publishing industry. Years
ago, if you wanted to publish a book, you'd have to convince a gatekeeper at a
publishing house who blockaded bad writing from entering the space. If you
didn’t get the publisher’s attention, you didn’t get published, and the world
wasn't exposed to your work. Today, compliments of Amazon, the Internet, and
eBooks, anyone can write a book and throw it up on the web. Suddenly legendary
authors like Stephen King are swimming with hacks who spent thirty minutes
writing 3,000 words of horrific literature.
After several successful indie authors made front-page news with stories of
six-figure incomes, easification’s lure was sweetened with tales of big money.
Hear that thunder in the distance? That’s the stampede of money-chasing
value-cheaters, storming into town, looking for easy money. And unfortunately,

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even my forum has contributed to such nonsense. In the self-publishing
category, there are several great authors who are doing well (some sold
millions!), but there are also the money-chasers who have no interest in quality
writing or the authorship experience—they just want to make money. They’ve
turned the entire process into a churn-and-burn: launch fifty books into the
Amazon ecosystem and hope they sell. Now imagine when you have 100,000
starry-eyed entrepreneur/author/money-chasers doing the same thing.
The consequence? Declining margins and profitability. Ten years ago, the
average eBook was priced at $9.99. Now it’s $1.99. And it’s why most ninety-
nine-cent books are utter crap.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF DIFFICULTY: THERE IS NO FUCKING LIST
Failed entrepreneurs fail for many reasons. One is they don’t understand
entrepreneurship—what it is and what it is not. Entrepreneurship isn’t about
nomadding in Thailand on a beach with an open laptop while drinking an
umbrella drink. It's not about flashy cars and fistfuls of cash posted on
Instagram, passive income, or a 
Forbes
cover story. 
Entrepreneurship is about
problem-solving, creating convenience, satisfying desires, and becoming valuable.
You see, when you say, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” what you’re really
saying is, “I want to be a lifetime problem-solver.” Those solved problems then
translate into value for those who need their problem solved.
On the other hand, an easified entrepreneur who’s drunk the shortcut Kool-
Aid wanders aimlessly: They love entrepreneurship’s benefits, but they don’t love
solving problems. Instead, they’re looking for plug-and-play, paint-by-numbers
solutions, ironically created by the real entrepreneurs. Simply sign up here and
you have a business! Complete this form and you'll get our FREE quick-start
guide! Just follow this one step, and wham, you’re now a CEO! The duplicity of
an easified entrepreneur is like trying to speed skate but refusing to take the ice.
Easified entrepreneurs say shit like, “I have this great idea…but it’s too hard!”
If you’re an entrepreneur scoping for ideas, 
the best are the hard ones because
the difficulty represents the opportunity
. When difficulty doesn’t exist and the
Commandment of Entry looms, another red flag is hoisted: you aren’t solving
any problems.
Think about that.
If you do something that takes minutes to accomplish or solve, was there
really a problem? Or are you merely stacking yourself atop a mountain of already

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existing solutions? If you’re starting a Mexican restaurant in a city full of
Mexican restaurants, you aren’t satisfying dire cravings.
The unfortunate reality of “it’s too hard” as a roadblock is great ideas are
overlooked. If your idea requires advanced programming and you don’t know
how to do it, you move on to the next idea. If your invention requires electrical
engineering and plastic mold injection and you don’t know where to find these
people, darn, next idea. And then the circle jerk of idea-hopping ensues, a never-
ending scavenger hunt for the next great idea, the one simplistically executed or
invented, the one that exactly fits your skillset and knowledge base, and the one
that, unfortunately, solves nothing.
Again, the difficulty is the opportunity. 
The magnitude of the problem solved
is the magnitude of the money you can make
.
There is no fucking list.
There is no fucking list giving you the exact steps. There is no fucking list
telling you what to do, how to do it, and where to do it. There is no fucking list
that tells you who the best Chinese manufacturers are and which products are
the most profitable to import.
Speaking of importing, several times a week, I read about people who want to
arbitrarily sell stuff on Amazon and head straight over to Alibaba, looking for
that magical product that will put them into seven figures a year while lounging
on a beach in Bali. Except, guess what? Everyone else on Alibaba is looking for
the same thing. Crowds, simplicity, and easy access doesn't translate into
opportunity because the opportunity has already been raped by the mob.
There is no fucking list and once you discover there isn’t one, be happy about
it.
Take for instance my millionaire friend who owns a successful business. He
sells a ton of stuff on Amazon. Recently he examined a “Selling Millions on
Amazon” eCourse put on by a guru. The price of this course was thousands of
dollars. After reviewing the course material, you know what his opinion was? 
Do
the opposite.
Take whatever the easified crowds and guru coaching courses are
doing, and go the other direction. Why? Because simplicity and the money-
chasing crowds tailgating this shit never make a sustainable income. Remember
that carrot?
In this Amazon coaching course, they include a ranking chart on potential
product strengths in terms of market, demand, and shipping viability. Products
that my friend would avoid like the plague were ranked highly desirable. Namely,
easy to sell, easy to import, and easy to ship.

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His product? It was ranked poorly. The crowd was told to avoid his product.
It’s freaking hilarious. And this guy lives a millionaire dream: travels half the
year, owns his house clear, drives dream cars, and lives a life 99 percent of the
world would love to have. You see, selling his product is difficult (and boring),
which limits competitors; the products 
they
recommended were easy. And while
such ease might be profitable for a few weeks, they won’t be profitable long
enough to change your life. The churn and burn of “easy” attracts stampedes of
easified entrepreneurs. And the only guy ultimately making bank is the BRO-
marketing guru selling the coaching program.
Similarly, there also aren’t any free handouts or mentors willing to sell out
their golden goose.