After reading over 60 books and summarizing them on my blog if anyone asks me what book changed my life or what my favorite book is it would have to be Unscripted by MJ Demarco.
Unscripted by MJ Demarco is a must-read for anyone who lives a scripted life meaning they have an ordered schedule they adhere to from Monday to Friday and there seems to be no escaping it.
I just had a horrendous year after graduating college in the real world and this book just speaks out to me. I’m glad I found Unscripted and the Millionaire Fastlane this early I hope this summary can help you too.
The Script
So what is the script you ask?
It’s modern-day slavery.
We’ve been living our entire lives based on a Script.” Once we are born we go to school for 20 years while getting indoctrinated into working a 9-5 for another 30-40 odd years while we pay our bills and then we die.
If you are okay with living a scripted life and you think that at least this passes the time then this book is not for you but if you are pissed and you want more out of your life and if you want to escape the rat race and start a purpose-driven life then living an Unscripted life is your best bet.
If you follow conventional wisdom you will lead a conventional life. So you need to think out of the box and not like everyone else in order to live an unscripted life.
Your existence has been programmed from diapers to death if you look back and think about it.
Work harder from Monday to Friday and party harder on Saturday and Sunday. Giving up 5 days for 2 always gives a negative ROI but we have been conditioned to believe this is good for us.
If you want to live like the 1% you can’t think like the 99%. In mid-1995 MJ contemplated suicide stuck in a job he hated. Another part of the script is we think College educates us but in fact, it indebts us.
Are you happy with how your story is being written? Tolerating a dead-end job?
Mediocre comfort is a silent disease that poisons dreams. Give a man a tolerable job that pays for his mediocre comfort and he won’t change a damn thing. Week after week year after year, time passes but the story remains the same. Obediently passive and ignorant to the system.
Are you living life like there is a perpetual noose hung around your neck: hung every Monday, loosened Friday, retightened Sunday night, rinse, repeat?
Don’t be a lifetime rat racer. Your environment matters a lot. You are a product of the 5 people you spend your time with. Escape the matrix and live an unscripted life today. Entrepreneurship can produce financial freedom fast.
As the SCRIPT’s newest manufactured M.O.D.E.L. Citizen, life is:
(M)EDIOCRE: Life has regressed into an unremarkable yet comfortable ordinariness, where thriving is not an objective, but surviving.
(O)BEDIENT: Free-thinking is dead; you follow the popular opinion and trust your government and the news organizations fanning the flames of your biases.
(D)EPENDENT: You’re a debt-serf owned by an army of corporations: product and service producers, Wall Street, government—or worse, you are owned by time.
(E)NTERTAINED: Your entertained and humored mind distracts the heart to the point where your soul is no longer heard.
(L)IFELESS: Dead at twenty-five but not buried until seventy-five. Goals, are nonexistent. Optimism, is scant. Dreams, murdered.
Do What you love myth
Follow your passion, do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life. This sounds good but doesn’t work for the majority because no one’s hiring and no one’s paying.
This saying is same as the script. Skills alone do not guarantee business success. If you are barely profiting doing what you love isn’t it time to quit and find something else?
It’s about you. Instead of doing what you love find out what the market needs and provide value. Value creation is the only way to break free from the matrix.
Whatever you do, the key is to create value for someone else AND do it by a new process (or skill) that you must learn on the fly.
Steve Jobs is famous for saying do what you are passionate about and you will never work a day in your life. If what he did didn’t have a market he wouldn’t have said that.
The Power of Compound Interest or is it a scam?
Yes Compound Interest does work but Compound interest works well with only large volumes. The people who preach compound interest live in a gated community in Las Vegas but do you think they practice what they preach?
Live poor young and die rich old doesn’t really make sense does it? Save till you’re 65 and then enjoy the twilight of your life when you’re too busted up to do anything.
Waiting 50yrs for wealth is like waiting 8hrs on a sinking Titanic.
The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as
many men as possible.
Bernard Baruch, Businessman
Innovation
In order to be an entrepreneur you don’t have to build the next Facebook or Uber. You need to get your first start with making a dollar online. It’s easier more than get started but since it’s so easy there’s more competition.
Once you realize there’s more ways of making money than just trading time for money a light bulb goes off in your head and opens you to unlimited opportunities.
Warren Buffet has a famous quote which goes If You Dont Find A Way To Make MOney While You Sleep You Will Work Until You Die. Once you realize this you have no choice but to innovate. As an Unscripted entrepreneur, you should be innovating and creating value.
Go against the grain and leave a trail behind. Find yourself an untapped Blue Ocean. Innovation is where most new business
opportunities reside.
How to live an unscripted life?
Unscripted has a bunch of stories picked up from the fastlane forum. Unscripted was primarily written to expose the cultural expectations and societal mores that have framed your current existence, and done so without your knowledge or consent.
This book has definitely been an eye opener for me and is a long and engaging read and I don’t think this summary can do it any justice. There is a video embedded below by a Youtuber Joshua Fluke who does a great job in explaining how me managed to live an unscripted life hope this helps 🙂
So why do you want to unscript your life?
