UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

PART ONE

The Dissonance… Is Something Wrong?

Author’s Objective: CONFESSION

To give clarity to the subtle whispers that have canvassed your life in pursuit of a confession: something in your life does not feel right.

1

Tales From the Script: A Monday Story

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30am by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

~ Charles Bukowski, Author

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT DAY

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Fuck.

It sounds like music, but it might as well be nails on a chalkboard.

It’s Monday morning, 5:15 a.m.

For the third time, my iPhone is screaming that Nickelback song I once loved, but now hate. Another snooze and I’ll be late.

Yes, it’s time to wake up.

After cursing myself for not changing that damn song to something by Metallica, I yank myself out of bed, slightly hungover from the night before. I dread the day—actually no, the week—to come. Needing a jump start, I stumble into the shower, hoping for a clean perspective. No luck. The forthcoming day rivals getting a colonoscopy. As I lynch-tie my neck and arm my suit, regret and resignation ravage my soul.

Something is not right.

Perhaps it’s the $800 suit. Perhaps it’s the credit card that paid for the suit. Perhaps it’s the stinking realization that my weekend highlight was watching two mediocre football teams play in the Las Vegas Bowl. Perhaps it’s the morning darkness and the stark reality that my short Cancun vacation is still months away.

Unfortunately, this is no time for a Jesus moment.

With moments to eat, I grab an artificially colored bowl of sugar-coated grain. With one eye on the clock and another on the meal plan pinned to the refrigerator—the one I’m supposed to follow religiously for the next eight weeks—I blame Toucan Sam for my first transgression.

Minutes later, I lumber to the driveway and wriggle into my car, sealing myself in the frigid cabin. My breath shivers a cloud. Ugh, I groan. Even my new Mercedes C-Class and its fifty-seven payments remaining has lost its luster. I back out of my driveway and head to the freeway.

For the next hour, I sit trapped, fender-to-bumper in my little box, with thousands of other people like me. What I don’t know is that my fellow commuters, some appearing more successful than I, are not happy either. Like me, they’ve failed their diets, failed their purpose, and failed their dreams. As a result, they’ve bribed their misery with more expensive boxes adorned with softer leather, shinier chrome, and fancier gadgets—boxes branded by prestigious insignia such as Lexus, Audi, and BMW.

Their mission, like mine, is appeasement: to bribe themselves into believing that they are different from the other 20,000 souls enslaved by the same paradigm imprisoning me.

Two miles and twenty minutes less from my life, I wonder, Is a sheep who drives a Mercedes to the slaughterhouse still a sheep?

Another hour drains before I arrive at my workplace where I pay seven bucks for the privilege to park near my building, a towering glass skyscraper that ironically, pierces the sky like a crystal dagger. As the orderly mob herds into the atrium, solemn yet caffeinated, I begin my day with a lie.

Good morning, I greet the receptionist as I rush into a crowded elevator.

As I ascend to the sixtieth floor with my fellow inmates, I have seconds to meditate: For the love of God, why can’t it be Friday? No time for fantasies, the doors slide open where purgatory awaits—a colossal floor featuring dozens of paneled cubes segregated into cells. Like a prison, each cell is customized to its occupant and decorated with family photos, knick-knacks engraved with biblical proverbs and unheeded platitudes, or an occasional art project from a child, yet to be cursed.

Quickly, I lipstick the pig: OK, at least I have a job. It’s a nice try, but I can’t hoodwink my heart; gratitude shouldn’t feel like death row at San Quentin.

I arrive at my cube, floor my satchel, and slump to my seat.

Odd.

Manny, my cubicle neighbor who starts his day an hour earlier than I, has not arrived. In fact, his desk has been wiped clean.

Then I see it.

Sitting atop my inbox and ominously stamped CONFIDENTIAL is a large manila envelope from corporate.

Shit, this can’t be good.

The last confidential love letter I received doubled my health insurance costs because Congress passed some fucked-up law that no one bothered to read. I dreadfully tear open the envelope.

Apparently, Manny was fired this morning for not doing his job. Well, actually his job was being done, just not by him. Supposedly, Manny deviously outsourced his duties to IT workers in China, allowing him to surf Reddit and watch funny cat videos all day. The clandestine operation scammed for months.

According to the corporate dispatch, Manny was let go and his work temporarily off-loaded to me. Company courtesy reads like an offer from Don Corleone: My work will expand one hour per day and one Saturday a month for the next three months—for the same exact pay. OMFG. And no, they’re not kidding.

Suddenly, I feel a scene from Star Wars involving a trash compactor. The air thins and my eyes gloss over as a suffocating cloud conjures above Cubicle 129A. I clench my teeth so tight that my capped molar breaks in half; at least my dentist will be happy. Rage follows. Then bitterness and betrayal. I’m not sure who I’d like to strangle: my boss, my coworker, or myself.

WTF has my life become?

Is this why I went to college for five years?

This wasn’t my plan!

As I pout like a child without my lollipop, temporary insanity gives way to functional logic: Grin and bear it. I’m trapped. I can’t quit. I have bills—credit cards, a mortgage, a fancy car, student loans to the tune of 50G—and no savings. And then there’s Amanda—my uptown, uptight girlfriend who demanded an engagement ring six months ago. Throw in a biological clock ticking at warp speed and our relationship is like riding the bumper cars at the county fair. This job is everything, I reason. Without it, I’m shitting bricks without a diaper.

For the next four hours, I sit in my cube, poking into my computer, suffering though the minutiae of purchase orders, past-due invoices, and IERs—internal escalation reports—the corporate world’s version of schoolyard demerits. As my day drags on and I realize four more days of this insufferable hell awaits, and half my Saturday, I stomach a depressing truth: My dreams are dead. The consolation prize for them has become a car and a weekend.

For the rest of my day, I slag through work, eyeballing the clock like a dog salivating for a bone. Tick by tick, minute by minute, the clock widens the incongruence gnawing at my brain. With each passing, a part of my soul dies. And yet each moves me closer to the day’s freedom.

Ten hours earlier, time ordered me awake, and now, time orders me to leave.

I hop back into my car, joining the others who endured a similar soul-suffocating day. I’m relieved it’s over and a lifeboat awaits: It’s Monday, and Monday means NFL Football. I crack the day’s first smile, one that disappears seven minutes later. There’s an accident on the I-90 freeway and I won’t be home for another two hours. And I’ll miss most of the game.

At home, defeated and demoralized, I drop-kick myself to the couch and crack open a cold Budweiser. It tastes like chilled piss. One sip and it’s clear: don’t use a butter knife when a chainsaw is needed. Four shots of Jack Daniels later and the mission’s accomplished.

The room is spinning.

I’m lost to the television and catch the final ten minutes of the Steelers/Broncos game—a blowout not worth watching.

Channel flipping through alternate realities, I pay homage to the television: I can anonymously watch the lives of those suffering the same doldrums as me or interestingly, those who have been lucky and escaped it.

As I toast the death of my dreams, a Law and Order rerun gives way to an infomercial narrated by an overexcited dude with a bad British accent. He’s selling a fat-squashing spandex compression girdle. Apparently, ten-years of custard donuts has a ten-second fix, assuming you don’t get naked with the fool you fooled. As the hucksters and their fat-choking bustier bellow on, I slowly fade and pass out—not into a deep sleep but a shallow oblivion void of rejuvenation.

Hours seem like minutes, abruptly shattered by a morning noise…

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Fuck.

It’s time to do this again…

2

Careless Whispers: Guilty Souls Have No Rhythm

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

~ Thomas Carlyle, Philosopher

THAT SOMETHING IS INDEED SOMETHING…

This story was my story. While I’ve adapted and embellished it to contemporary life, it’s ghostwritten by my experience. Replace the iPhone with an alarm clock, a Mercedes with a Mitsubishi, and a cubicle with a limousine cab and you have it: a familiar story repeated by millions, day after day, year after year. While my story might not resemble your day, many walls can cage a prison. I had many: a warehouse, the front seat of a cargo van, a data-entry cubicle, and—how could I forget—a filthy kitchen in a Chinese restaurant. Your prison could be a nondescript office in a skyscraper, a suburban precinct, or a hospital operating room. Even esteemed professionals, doctors and lawyers, have found that the most comfortably respected prison is still, well, a prison.

However, what’s important are not the walls that frame your story but the sense that something is wrong. A careless whisper guilts your soul; a heartfelt pleading bemoaning regret and restlessness; a guttural dissonance which you’ve camouflaged by the mundane and the mediocre. If you’re young, perhaps you haven’t felt this something yet, but you’ve seen it. For example, take this post at The Fastlane Forum:

I’m nineteen, finishing my second year of college. As I sit around the table with my family and spin the spaghetti around my fork, it’s clear.

My mother has been working fifteen years at a job she hates. My father has a master’s degree in electrical engineering where he’s worked at NASA making military hardware. He has been laid off several times and gone unemployed for months at a stretch. He works now, but I noticed something…

They are not happy. The life is sucked out of them.

No passion. No dreams. No goals.

Just the same thing.

Every.

Single.

Day. ¹

Like this student observed, many of these somethings are tangible. They can sit in front of you as two parents dead to the world. My something was framed on a wall: two business degrees that cost me five years and $40,000—yeah, the ones that got me that great ten-dollar-an-hour job slinging pipe in the Chicago slums. Your tangible something could be your garage, the one with the twenty-three-horsepower riding mower, surely jeering the neighbors envious, and yet, you’re still unfulfilled and unhappy. Or worse, it’s an air mattress in your parents’ basement, the one you bought for camping that’s become a temporary bed, at least until you can figure things out before your thirty-third birthday.

The other somethings are intangible and resonate as white noise—a nagging chorus of dissonant emotions continually whispering life’s swill.

If you’re younger, one of these whispers could be shame pacified by faux fame: you’ve earned rock-star status on Xbox Live, but in the real world, you haven’t earned jack.

Another whisper could be the sting of insignificance: if you were suddenly kidnapped and beamed to planet Romulus, no one outside your family would give a shit other than your roommate, who really isn’t missing you—he just misses your half of the rent payment.

Other whispers are weekly appointments with anguish: the arrival of Sunday night and its awaiting Monday feels like hide-and-seek with the grim reaper. Or perhaps the whisper is contempt salted with guilt: you hate your job, your boss, and your company, but damn, that paycheck is instant amnesia.

If you’re older, the whispers likely stew as frustration: You did everything right in life as recommended and directed by authority, and yet, no matter how much you work, save, and scrimp, getting ahead is impossible. Some urgent expense always looms—the dog needs shots, the car needs tires, or the kids need cash for a school project.

Other whispers echo as disbelief and skepticism: the bank paid seven cents in interest last year and, at the rate your 401(k) is growing, you’ll retire by the twenty-fourth century.

And then there’s perhaps the most haunting whisper: regret. You were going to do something with your life. Be rich. Famous. A CEO. Independently successful. A parent who spends time with their kids beyond throwing a pizza on the dinner table and calling it a night. Yup, you were going to be accomplished, proud, and happy. But now it’s all a dead dream sitting atop a stack of bills, atop a desk, atop a mediocre life.

Every something tormenting your daily humdrum hints of a great deception. Clues to a ruse. An imminent awareness that only needs its confession: You’re living, but you aren’t alive.

Your heart beats, but there is no pulse.

Your mind is poisoned, but the toxicology is clean.

Your soul has been stolen, but there are no thieves.

Suspicion has swelled while the incongruity gnaws.

Yes, this wasn’t the life you signed up for.

This wasn’t your plan.

Something is wrong.

INSIGHT(S) TO CONSIDER…

Your soul will resonate its desires and discontent when faced with quiet or minimal distraction; for example sleeping, showering, or during a massage.

QUESTION(S) TO PONDER…

How are you responding to your soul’s voice? Is it denied? Ignored? Muzzled with the intense demand of meaningless work? Distracted by a television? Honored?

3

The Modern-Day Matrix: The Script

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

~ Dresden James, Author

WHAT IF I TOLD YOU...

Something is indeed something. For most people, it’s dismissed as life’s background noise. Others hear the whispers and bury it with weekend merriment. For the rest of us who aren’t easily manipulated, we question it. We seek its source, challenge its presence, and ask, What the hell is going on?

My first hint that something was wrong with the world happened as a struggling young entrepreneur in Chicago. At the time, I had a menial job as a limousine driver, which paid my bills and funded my crazy business ideas. Because the job required a special license granted by the city, I had to drive downtown to take a test for its qualification. I arrived early with time to blow, so I grabbed a coffee and seated myself at a cafe window. As I gazed out into the commuter swarms navigating the Monday morning rush, I noticed something: Everyone moved with an eerie robotic efficiency, indifferent and obtuse. The variety of faces, no matter the age, race, or gender, were uniformly vacant and resigned, each etched with a stone-faced glower as if they’ve walked the walk a thousand times.

As the organized freneticism mesmerized me, the street rush slowly faded into an obscure moving fog. Unique individuals with goals, dreams, and aspirations; sons, daughters, wives, husbands, all suddenly blurred into a single collective as if one organism compelled by instinct. Did any part of the sum question why they were on a frozen street at 6:30 a.m.? And why would they repeat the same insanity for the next four days? Was anyone pursuing their dream, or were they pursuing what culture programmed them to pursue?

The sudden realization struck me—and frightened me: it was not free will at work, but conditioned instinct, like a bee buzzing to the hive or an ant marching to an anthill. Moreover, dress or implied social hierarchy played no relevance: three-piece suits, jeans, work overalls—the horde behaved as if controlled by a single puppet master.

As I reflected on the scene, I knew I could never—and would never—be normal as prescribed by cultural routine. That day sealed my fate as an entrepreneur—either one who’d eventually succeed or one who would fail and die trying. Lucky for me (and you), entrepreneurship was the snips that clipped the puppet master’s strings.

In the 1999 hit movie, The Matrix, Neo is given a choice: swallow the blue pill and continue living a mediocre ignorance, or swallow the red pill and jolt awake to a free but imperfect truth. Within the film’s dark dystopia, The Matrix represents the default operating system for the human species, a virtual reality enslaving us to a parasitic machine race. While comatose and imprisoned, the machines feed our minds with a simulation designed to keep us oblivious, distracted, and obedient to the system draining our humanity.

Well…

What if I told you that our world suffers from the same deception—a deception orchestrated not by artificial intelligence but by conventional intelligence? A deception of unchallenged and outdated wisdom, a dream-killing dogma tyrannized by stale traditions, narrow beliefs, and cultural conformity? A deception that represents the greatest con of the civilized world—a ruse that feigns freedom and comfort, when in truth, its sole purpose is economic slavery and human homogenization, a servitude system where you become an instrument, not of inspiration or aspiration but of perspiration and desperation.

What if I told you that this deception has infiltrated your mind and embedded itself as your default operating system, an autonomous program shadowing your entire life, from cradle to grave, from career to companionship, a presumptuous, yet unwritten rulebook by which all decisions are weighed, regardless of consequence to heart or soul?

What if I told you that this operating system has granted you an inauthentic life of someone else’s design? A life you did not choose. A life meticulously preplanned and preordained to follow a predictable blueprint of mediocrity. A life where dreams are forsaken for a television and a paycheck. A life consecrated by an obsolete template, decreed by authority, sanctified by education, certified by media, and obfuscated by government. A life serving to die versus living to serve.

What if I told you you’ve become an unwitting participant in an obligatory game, one victim in a genocide of dreams, a pawn institutionally directed by the rank doctrine that every human must go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, use credit cards, finance a car, mortgage a house, stare at the latest smartphone (further entrenching your obedience), save and cheapskate your paycheck while entrusting it to Wall Street, all while you continue feeding the bloodthirsty parasites drunk on your life force?

What if I told you that all your whispers, the despondence, the uneasiness, is your soul knocking on the door of consciousness, pleading to be heard?

Get red-pilled my fellow human being…

You aren’t living by free will; you’re living by a SCRIPT.

QUESTION(S) TO PONDER…

Sunday evening is the litmus test for a SCRIPTED existence—how do you feel about the impending Monday? Excited? Or dour and cheerless?

PART TWO

The Script… Engineering Your Involuntary Slavery

Author’s Objective: AWARENESS

To expose the cultural expectations and societal mores that have framed your current existence and done so without your knowledge or consent. To defeat the enemy, you have to know the enemy.

4

The Inauthentic Life: Trapped By Other People’s Thinking

The problem is not people being educated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they’ve been taught, but not educated enough to question what they’ve been taught.

~ Author Unknown

THE SCRIPT - THE PARADIGM IS SHIT…

The SCRIPT.

It’s not an instruction booklet given at grade school or map stapled to your college degree. It’s not seen or touched, but it is there. Like the air you breathe, it’s invisibly omnipresent.

My downtown trip featuring a horde of caffeinated zombies highlights the typical plight of a first-world human, regardless of country or culture: Forced awake, drag yourself out of bed; drive, train, or walk to a tolerated job; and exist on autopilot—eight hours a day, five days a week, for the next fifty years. Like a scuffed record repeating its track, today plays like yesterday, which will play exactly like tomorrow. As a result, life’s paycheck becomes a weekend where the workweek’s postponements are reclaimed, a layaway earmarked for fun or relaxation, a respite to recharge your soul from the strain of the transaction.

What few know is, we’ve been programmed for this existence, a willful modern-day slavery. You see, like an operating system on a computer, the SCRIPT runs the show. Give it life’s helm and accept my sympathies. It will command how you think, work, play, vote, save, invest, retire—and how you die.

In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs said, Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Steve Jobs was referring to the SCRIPT: an inescapable gospel of cultural presumptions woven by other people’s thinking; a browbeaten pantheon of provincial beliefs and sanctified social mores.

So, ask yourself, is this your thinking? Or other people’s thinking?

Go to college and earn a degree, regardless of cost, demand, or economics. Finance your commodified education with an indiscriminate appetite for student loans, notwithstanding the five preapproved credit cards you’ve already accepted. Graduate with empty credentials and a useless degree making you no different from millions with the same degree. Leave the cloistered world of university saddled in debt—either yourself, your parents, or both. Get a job so you can officially join the privileged ranks of a time prostitute—trading huge blocks of your life’s time bank, five days of seven, in exchange for little pieces of paper called money. Slave all day, usually repeating monotonous tasks, so you can pay for the education you just finished, the clothes you just dressed, the car you just drove, and the apartment you just left. Use credit cards to live conveniently: Starbucks for breakfast, Chipotle for lunch, and Chick-fil-A for dinner. Party hard at the club. Buy rounds of drinks, trying to impress strangers and women out of your league. Buy overpriced bottles of vodka, hit the VIP room, and try impressing them more. Rack up debt unrestrained; after all, it’s celebration time—you graduated!

Grow older.

Climb the corporate ladder. Wake up, hit snooze, and wake up again. Get into a routine: work, traffic, Seinfeld reruns, sleep. Repeat four times this week. Work overtime and show your corporate overlords that you’re willing to do whatever it takes. Schmooze your boss, the one with the bad suit and the bad breath. Hate your job, tolerate your coworkers, but love your paycheck. Get a pay raise and a promotion. Buy a cool car, a cool condo, and some cool clothes. Live a fabulous weekend enriched by spirited drinking and escapism entertainment. Work hard, play harder. Spend unrestrained—after all, YOLO!

Grow older.

Follow fashion: Prada, Louis Vuitton, Chanel. Follow pop culture: LeBron, Miley, TMZ. Follow popular television drama: Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead. Follow the lives of fake people on fake television shows portrayed as reality. Worship celebrities and athletes. Adopt celebrity opinions and their politics because they’re famous. Pay your taxes. Pay your bills: your mortgage, your car payment, your cable bill, your homeowners’ association fees. Continue stacking debt—after all, you work hard and deserve it.

Grow older.

Vacation two weeks every year, but only when the overlords permit. Charge the latest and greatest stuff: Dr. Dre owns noise-canceling headphones; P. Diddy owns this; Lady Gaga owns that. Spend to feel accomplished. Spend to feel good, at least until Monday arrives or the bill that Monday must pay. Spend to fill a void you can’t explain. Feel cornered: by a job, a mortgage, a car, a credit card, and by an existence. Feel freedom drip away while medicating the truth with more distraction: more consumer debt and more fictional escapes.

Grow older.

Hear your biological clock ticking. Worry you’re still single. Date a friend. Date a coworker. Start online dating: Tinder, Match, eHarmony. Meet your mate. Marry your mate. Spend a fortune on a six-hour wedding, one that takes six years to pay off.

Continue working. Continue spending. Continue distraction. Continue dreading your Sunday night. Dread Monday more. Dream about quitting. Dream about traveling the world. Dream about waking up when you want to wake up. Dream about greatness, something more meaningful than the meaningless of paying bills and repeating. Dream about dreams long dead.

Grow older.

Have kids. Raise your kids. Get responsible. Change your debt perception. Start retirement planning. Follow the advice of obnoxious radio personalities, like the one with the orange tan and the popped collar. Take financial advice brokered by broke brokers. Learn how to get rich from people who aren’t rich. Save 10 percent of your paycheck, max your 401(k), contribute to an IRA and an indexed mutual fund. Invest everything saved into the stock market, hope for 10 percent, and pray to avoid a crash.

Save for your child’s college education. Work harder and longer. Get out of debt. Make a budget. Follow a budget. Clip coupons. Cancel the movie channels. Cancel the cable subscription. Stop drinking Starbucks. Stop eating Chipotle. Bag a lunch. Stop going to the movies, stop shopping name brand, and stop shopping period. Stop dreaming about sports cars because every dime must be coveted and handed to Wall Street. Settle for less, stop enjoying, stop living, and start dying.

Grow older.

Trust you’ll be able to retire by sixty-five. Trust you’ll be alive by sixty-five. Trust Wall Street. Trust compound interest, hoping it gives you 10 percent a year despite zero interest rates for the last decade. Trust the economy always has a job for you. Trust your house continually appreciates. Trust the mainstream media while believing their objectivity. Trust the drug companies. Trust the food you’re eating is healthy. Trust the USDA food pyramid, the FDA, and its board of pharmaceutical executives. Trust your obese doctor. Trust your government representatives.

Wither older.

Insist that your kids get good grades so they can get into a good college and, like you, get a good job so they can repeat the same death march you can’t escape. Teach your kids the difference between pipe dreams and reality.

Continue working. Continue aging in indifference. Repeat, set to autopilot, and patiently wait while chained to the worst partners ever partnered: hope and time. Hope the stock market grew your portfolio. Hope inflation hasn’t ravaged your portfolio. Hope compound interest yields the projected returns promised by the fiscal sycophants. Hope your money hasn’t been hyperinflated away by blank-check politicians. Hope Social Security still exists. Hope there’s enough money left to win the free time you’ve never had and always dreamed of.

Wither older.

Feel regret. Remorse. Your bucket list is full- and your-time bank is near empty. Your portfolio shares a similar state of emptiness. Hit sixty-five. Come to the unpleasant truth that hope and time haven’t yielded the promised 10 percent per year. Delay retirement. Delay the wife’s retirement. Delay for more work, more saving, and more frugality.

Unfortunately, time doesn’t give a shit. Time doesn’t care that you were promised a carefree retirement because you trusted six decades to an index fund. Time doesn’t care that a dream cruise is years away. Time doesn’t care that you worked for sixty years, spent a fortune bolstering the economy, and paid a king’s ransom in taxes. Time doesn’t care what was promised and not delivered.

Because time says it’s time to die…

Before retirement, before the bucket list, before resolving the regret…

Welcome to the SCRIPT…

Manufactured by conventional wisdom…

Distributed by institutionalized indoctrination…

And swallowed with blind faith…

Wake up…the product being manufactured is you.

INSIGHT(S) TO CONSIDER…

Herds are organized for economic purposes: slaughter, shearing, milking. Herd with the crowd and you will get predictable results designed for the crowd.

HOW I ESCAPED MANUFACTURED MEDIOCRITY

I’ve been fortunate.

Unlike most youngsters, my SCRIPTED programming was stalled by a viral seed of doubt. But it didn’t start that way. As expected, environment and circumstance kick-started the process. I was raised in a dysfunctional lower-middle-class family, a fertile garden for SCRIPTED roots. By my early teens, the bedrock had been laid: get good grades, get into a good college, graduate, and get a good job.

My dreams of an extraordinary life suffered an early death with the death of my parents’ marriage. Dad bailed for the drinking and swinging single life and left my high-school-educated mom with three expensive tyrants. That’s when I learned about real life: no new clothes, no first-run movies, and no Sizzler. Settling for less was life. And that’s when I gave up thinking that life would be anything but ordinary. Back then, a popular television program, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, reinforced a SCRIPTED theme: Fantastic dreams were for the rich and famous—celebrities, pro athletes, and rock stars. I couldn’t sing, my gut swallowed my waist, and I certainly wasn’t Sinatra’s second coming. Circumstances cultivated the seed, and SCRIPT indoctrination was underway.

And then something happened. And it changed everything.

I don’t remember my age, but I was old enough to ogle sports cars and sixteen-year-old girls. While rolling over to the ice cream parlor, hoping to further inflate the tire around my stomach, I spotted a Lamborghini Countach parked outside—my dream car. I froze in a drooling, wide-eyed trance. My appetite, forgotten. My shyness, spurned. Overcome with adrenaline, I kissed my comfort zone good-bye and asked the young owner what he did for work.

His response?

He said he was an entrepreneur—specifically, an inventor.

And at that moment, while accosted by this gorgeous piece of machinery, something clicked: I became aware that dreams were not just for athletes, rocks stars, and Hollywood actors but also for entrepreneurs. And those dreams could happen young.

Wham.

The SCRIPT’s viral threat was born. The incident planted a rogue code and seeded my entrepreneurial DNA, a path that grew into more than a random career choice—it became an awareness and a defense to the biggest scams of the century.

In the years that followed, I nurtured this seed while the SCRIPT failed its assimilation.

As a teenager, I practiced neighborhood entrepreneurship, albeit failingly (more on that later). In high school and college, I studied entrepreneurship extensively on my own—my school offered no such curriculum. Story after story, my research confirmed the truth: Successful entrepreneurs were among the few who lived extraordinarily, both in material and spiritual abundance. Mind you, back then business start-ups weren’t glorified by weekly reports of billion-dollar liquidation events from upstart garage projects and ramen noodle diets.

By the time I graduated college, having suffered through a mélange of how to be a good employee, I was further all-in on entrepreneurship, knowing I could never lynch a tie five times a week. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of entrepreneurship would not be my job. It would be my life. However, looking back, I wasn’t prepared for what awaited: a world that sung the same song from every radio where lowering the volume is as difficult as bending steel with your bare hands. Continue onward and let the truth be your mute.

QUESTION(S) TO PONDER…

What presumptive rules, social mores and cultural norms have you followed without question? And have those constructs given you the life you dreamed?

5

Conventional Wisdom: The Road To A Conventional Life

Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught HOW to think, while millions have been taught WHAT to think?

~ Peter Hitchens, Journalist and Author

CONVENTIONAL = ORDINARY = MEDIOCRITY

The SCRIPT’s most powerful weapon is its implied social contract—a social contract inked by conventional wisdom dispensed by conventional people living conventional lives. And anytime you comply with the social mandates, you endorse the contract.

However, the jig doesn’t end there. Dig deeper and the SCRIPT packs a more insidious truth: an institutional army of parasites, profiteers, and conspirators who feed off SCRIPTED hosts. Deep Throat had it right—follow the money. The official definition? The SCRIPT is conventional wisdom directing a conventional life, dispensed by either a compromised party of convention or a profiteering party of prejudice.

Now, when I say conventional wisdom, I’m not referencing uncommon sense, like gambling your entire paycheck at the roulette table or driving after nine margaritas. Nope, I’m talking about the unchallenged social standards and assumptive dogma driving the human experience within any first-world culture. Take for example the following statements, all representing either prescriptive or assumptive SCRIPTED doctrine:

To succeed in life, you need a college degree.

A college graduate earns X more dollars than someone who doesn’t.

Comfort and security start with a good job at a good company.

Starting a business is risky.

To get rich, you should pinch pennies and eliminate all unnecessary expenditures.

To grow wealth, you should faithfully invest your saved pennies into the stock market, preferably in a low-cost indexed mutual fund.

To retire rich, be patient through the decades and let compound interest work its magic.

Wealth is measured by your bank account and the material possessions it buys: the house where you live, the car you drive, the clothes you wear.

Your home is a great investment.

Monday through Friday is for work; Saturday and Sunday are for play.

Retirement happens at sixty-five or, if you’re a hard worker and a good investor, fifty-five.

The trusted instruments of wealth accumulation are IRAs, 401(k)s, and a well-diversified portfolio, namely indexed mutual funds.

If you want to make more money, go back to school and get an advanced degree.

Money doesn’t buy happiness.

Good things come to those who wait.

Follow your passion, do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life.

Time is money.

Each of these statements (or any derivative phrasing) is what I call SCRIPTSpeak. On any given day, at any given website, you’re perpetually bludgeoned over the head with this bunk like no one has heard it before.

If this advice has you stuck in a shithole, take heart. You aren’t to blame as much as you think. The fact is, your current situation might not have been your plan, but it’s the SCRIPT’s plan. Your college thanks you. Your bank thanks you. Your government thanks you. Your retail stores, restaurants, and corporations thank you. Hollywood thanks you. Wall Street’s minions—their brokers, their bankers, and their CNBC personalities—thank you. And moving forward unchanged, they will thank you until you’ve worked your last hour and invested your last dime.

You see, like Steve Jobs, who wasn’t trapped by the dogma of conventional wisdom, the rich get richer because the rich aren’t bound by the SCRIPT—they’re the ones profiting from it.

The proliferation of SCRIPTSpeak is not random. It is either autonomically regurgitated by a compromised party or meticulously orchestrated by a prejudiced party. No matter who’s the parrot, you should listen to neither.

THE COMPROMISED PARTY OF CONVENTION (THE CROWD)

A compromised party is someone who holds the SCRIPT as their life’s operating system. Compromised parties can be friends, family, coworkers, and authority figures: teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors. As such, SCRIPT propagation is parroted; the compromised party was taught X, Y, and Z as a youngster, and now, as an adult, they will convey the same beliefs because it’s the only reality they know. The nine-to-five, paycheck-to-paycheck, live-for-a-weekend is their life, and it shall become yours.

As a result, you’re another cow to be milked, no better than a soldier ant given his marching orders by the queen. When it comes to SCRIPTSpeak from the SCRIPTED, ask yourself this: If I accept average advice from average people living average lives, can I expect to be anything but average?

THE PROFITEERING PARTY OF PREJUDICE (THE MONEY)

Like a compromised party, a prejudiced party also disseminates SCRIPTED doctrine. However, whereas a compromised party parrots platitudes simply because they think it’s best for you, a prejudiced party profits from SCRIPTSpeak.

For example, a typical prejudiced party writes articles about how a SCRIPTED existence will yield future fortunes. As such, they profit from the sale of books, financial products, seminars, and various other fee-based products or services.

For example, in December of 2015, a MarketWatch.com article led with the headline, How time can turn $3,000 into $50 million. ² In this perfect example of SCRIPTED horseshit, the author begins his fantasy with the statement, I can’t say I’ve done it, but I’m going to show you how you could.

Awesome. And let me show you how to jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Oh yeah, I haven’t done it, but don’t worry, you’ll be in front of me to soften the blow when your ignorant butt splatters on the concrete.

But wait, this shit gets better.

The author goes on to say that the illustrious fifty-million-dollar fantasyland happens with regular, 12 percent market returns. Obviously in his SCRIPTED Neverland, Madoff is legit and so are his returns. In any event, the author is involved in multiple ventures that profit from SCRIPTED doctrine, namely a wealth management and an investment advisory firm. Prejudiced party, ya think? Lock, stock, and barrel.

NO! I AM THE BOSS OF ME!

Daddy: I love your Lego castles. Are you going to be a king when you grow up?

Billy: Nah, I want to live in a trailer next to the steel mill. When I grow up, I’m going to be scrubbing the castle’s toilets.

First, let me say I have nothing against dirty work. I wrote, scrubbing toilets because it’s a chapter from my life. Yes, I had a job cleaning shit stains, which incidentally was a job I held after college. If only I could have scrubbed those shitters with my two business degrees…

Anyway, how would you react if your child aspired to scrub toilets? Perplexed? Concerned? Fib and correct him: You can be anything you set your mind to?

The truth is, our children don’t dream about mediocrity and uninspired living.

Had my son answered like this, I’d ask him why he felt that way. Would living in a trailer and scrubbing toilets make him happy? If so, it’s the end of the story. But I doubt any child in recorded history has ever answered the when you grow up question with a tale of trailer-park living and shit-scrubbing labor.

When you were a kid and an adult scolded you to do stuff you didn’t like, you’d assert, No! I am the boss of me!

You see, before the SCRIPT clawed into you, you were once free. Pure and unmolested. You’d wake up happy and excited about the day. As a kid, you had fantastic dreams and unstoppable visions powering an optimistic future. You wanted to be the next DiCaprio, the next Hemingway, the next Jordan, the next Elvis, the next Picasso, the next great something—if not worldly, then locally, as a gourmet chef, a brave firefighter, or a respected policeman. Whatever your dreams, you acted on them on the playground, in books, or by Halloween costume. Dreams were alive and teeming with probability.

And then something happened.

You grew up.

Suddenly you were no longer the boss of you. You were issued into an educational system that happened, not surprisingly, Monday through Friday—the perfect, practiced assimilation to what was foreshadowed. And suddenly the reality of your friends, family, and peers became yours.

With no explanation and no event to mark the shift, everyone encouraging your dreams suddenly changed their stories. Be realistic. Grow up. That’s impossible. Stop daydreaming about this and that. Reality became a picture painted by the brush strokes from everyone around you who lived in unremarkable mediocrity.

What happened?

The SCRIPT—modern civilization’s impermeable intranet where dreams are killed and life routinizes into the mundane and trivial—got into your head. And the rest becomes history: the worthless degree, the debt stockpile, the contemptible job, the weekend bribe, the elderly retirement…

QUESTION(S) TO PONDER…

WHO or WHAT has become the boss of you? A pile of student loan debt? A job, a car payment, or a mortgage? Unwritten expectations from family or peers?

6

The Scripted Operating System: The Web Of Servitude

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.

~ Dresden James, Author

THE FRAMEWORK FOR OBEDIENCE

A spider weaves a web for one purpose: to ensnare prey for consumption later. Like a spider, the SCRIPT also weaves a web, an operating system that programs your mind to accept a voluntary slavery destined for obedience and economic servitude.

The SCRIPTED operating system (OS) codes itself with a distro. (In computing, a distro is a software collection which distributes an operating system to end users.) The SCRIPT’s distro is responsible for dissemination, then assimilation. And like all software programmed for a purpose, the SCRIPTED OS also has its purpose: to manufacture you into a M.O.D.E.L. Citizen tamed to its precepts.

Your defense is knowledge.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of entrepreneurship is the offense.

Here is the SCRIPTED OS decoded:

THE SEEDERS:

Like a torrent hosted within a computer system, seeders write and enforce SCRIPTED doctrine. As described earlier, seeders are compromised or prejudiced parties.

THE HYPERREALITIES:

The SCRIPT’s illusions, the hyperrealities reinforce your obedience and captivity through deception, distortion, or diversion.

TEMPORAL PROSTITUTION:

Seeders and their hyperrealities sanctify a criminal trade for your most precious asset: your time.

THE LIFE PATHS:

The illusion of free choice and deciding your slave owner: Door A, the Sidewalk; or Door B, The Slowlane. Both lead to the slaughterhouse. Neither makes you the boss of you.

DISTRACTION:

If you’re distracted, the SCRIPTED OS stays hidden. M.O.D.E.L. Citizenship becomes a foregone conclusion.

M.O.D.E.L. CITIZENSHIP:

You unwillingly become a SCRIPTED servant who is (M)ediocre, (O)bedient, (D)ependent, (E)ntertained, and (L)ifeless and who then becomes a seeder, a compromised party propagating the SCRIPTED OS.

7

The Seeders: Our Life Sucks, Yours Should Too

We are not taught to be thinkers, but reflectors of our culture. Let’s teach our children to be thinkers.

~ Jacque Fresco, Futurist

THE 6 SEEDERS CODING YOUR INDOCTRINATION

Seeders indoctrinate and/or disseminate. Either individuals or institutions, seeders are responsible for getting the software into your head and keeping it there. Whenever SCRIPTED doctrine risks exposure or faces scrutiny, it’s a seeder’s job to reeducate, or worse, shut down the debate entirely. Such reeducation could be a flawed study, an article, or some other anecdotal item pushed by a biased party using one of many logical fallacies, often arguments based on emotion rather than fact. And in many cases, the person questioning convention is branded a quack or an extremist.

For instance, had you lived in tenth-century China, you would have been taught the Earth is flat. The seeders, both compromised and prejudiced parties, then disseminate the lie.

With a compromised party, the seeder is an authority figure, usually a parent or a teacher, who merely parrots what they learned or lived. Twenty years ago, my teacher taught me flat Earth and now you will learn it too. With a compromised party, there isn’t malicious intent. The afflicted party is unknowingly miseducating you so that you fit in and are normal.

In the other case, a prejudiced party knows the accepted presumption is a lie yet profits from its ongoing falsehood. In our flat-Earth tale, a prejudiced party could be a government, the media, or a businessperson.

For instance, let’s say you live in a small coastal village landlocked by impassable mountains. The village leaders tyrannically suggest every citizen work sixteen-hour days, six days a week. The village plutocrats, thanks to a profitable tax system, live lavishly and work sparingly. They also know the truth—the Earth is not flat—but through benevolent, state-sponsored education, they teach the lie: The Earth is flat and sailing away is ‘dangerous and risky.’

But trouble brews. Outside town lives a young boatman who dishonors the village chieftains and claims the Earth is round. Behind his outlandish claim is another claim: he says he’s successfully sailed the ocean and found a better way of life. Upon hearing such blasphemy and knowing its threat to the village’s economic prosperity, the leaders (who control the media) publish news stories smearing the boatman as a crazy lunatic. Other label his reports as fake news. As such, the villagers dismiss the boatman and remain pliant to the cultural system their leaders have ordained, not knowing a better life is just a short sail to the east.

Our world suffers a similar scenario, thanks to six seeders who