(Originally posted Saturday, December 06, 2008 )
Many self help gurus like to talk about things like the “10 Steps to Success” or the “Road to Riches” or the “Path To Self Actualization.” However, nobody ever gives you an easy 10-step manual that explains how to go to hell in your own way. Seeing that there was a huge market void here, I decided to craft my own: “Ten Steps to Abject Failure” TM
Here is a rundown of the 10 steps, everything you will need to get on your way to not achieving any kind of success:
1. A Totally Shit Attitude
People often say that your attitude tells other people how you feel about them and about yourself. But “attitude” means many other things as well. It is also a dance maneuver like an arabesque in which your raised leg is bent at the knee. It is also the position of an aircraft on its axis which lets you know if it’s going to land or if it’s going to fall into the ocean. If you appreciate me mocking the use of the word “attitude” then you probably have the exact kind of shit attitude you need to fail and to FAIL BIG!
2. You Need A Lot of Totally Unreachable GOALS
Many little girls not only want to be like Britney Spears. They want to BE Britney Spears. In other words, they identify so much with this person, just because she’s famous, that they have completely abdicated their responsibility to their own lives and to live in their own moment and the reality they share with friends and loved ones. Hindus say that everybody can have what they want. But if you want to be Britney Spears, you should know now … you’re totally fucked.
3. Have a lot of terrifying OBJECTIVES
There are some people who can’t achieve their completely unreachable long-term goals without first coming up with some spine-chillingly stupid objectives. Take for example John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman, two troubled men who, through a little initiative and brio and good-old-fashioned hard work, managed to get their names in the papers and become notorious historical figures that society will always remember. If that sounds too extreme, you might settle for something like a psychotically single-minded pursuit of money, perhaps by selling unregulated securities to old people.
4. Create rigidly organized filing systems that completely hamper inspiration.
Everybody knows that you have to be organized to make your goals and objectives come about. I suggest that you create your own Byzantine bureaucracy modeled on the U.S. Postal Service. The slow-moving, laborious, Sisyphean effort to get just one thing done will totally make none of it seem worthwhile.
5. Be obstinate
Willfulness and pride for its own sake can lead you to make killer decisions like impeding someone from getting what they need or standing in their way of their progress or quashing their idealism with gratuitous negativity. In other words, be like Dick Cheney.
6. Copy other people’s ideas
There are people who move us through inspiration. Dancers. Writers. Philosophers. Artists. It’s helpful for you to realize as a failure, however, that most of the best stuff has been done already, so the best you can do is pass it off as your own at a party in hopes of getting laid. Trying something new will be too weird and uncomfortable.
7. Don’t learn from failure
If you’ve failed once, you’ll probably fail again. Ouch! That hurts! For God’s sake, just stop trying! Successful people always stay committed to their dreams. But how obnoxious are they?
8. Not everybody can be a leader, so why in the hell are you so special?
The world would be pretty mixed up if everybody was a chief and nobody was a brave. Why, that wouldn’t work at all. Leadership is best left to people who have the guns and money.
9. Blame other people
It’s not written anywhere that you have to be accountable for everything. Take war and famine and economic collapse. Or your own unhappiness. That’s a lot of stuff for you to take on your own shoulders. Why not blame somebody else? You can blame almost anything on George Bush these days. Even your bad breakup, your bad test grade, or your burst appendix.
10. Have something to prove all the time.
Whether it’s a need to have a trophy wife; a need to have a million dollars in the bank; a need to invade the Crimea; a need to show that you, the short person, now has all the power; a need to show that your penis isn’t really the smallest in Queens; or that you’re not from a West Virginia white trash trailer park anymore; or a need to show that you are no longer the young, black, tiny lead singer of the Jackson Five; or a need even to show that you were an outsider as the only Jew in a small town in East Texas … whether it’s any of these things, you can’t help but need to have something to prove to people all the time. And boy, is that a recipe to fail!
If you want to join my program for the Ten Steps To Failure, just send me a check for $2 million, which I will then use in a Ponzi scheme to pay off my investors. And we’ll all be on our way to failing in no time.
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