Anyone can be anything they want – no, they cannot. Life is a series of trade-offs, for a variety of reasons associated with their mental capacity, commitments outside work including geography, family and social. People select the best available option, they do not get to choose from a wide variety of options in many cases.
Avoid negative people to get further in life – unless you choose to be alone most of the time, this is not really possible. Negative people can be helpful in unexpected ways. Where would Eeyore be if Winnie the Pooh, piglet and Robin acted like that?
You cannot avoid your family – yes you can. My mother’s children certainly aren’t people I would choose to associate with. They are greedy, irresponsible, dishonest nasty people and I refuse to parent people who are quite a bit older than I am.
Your destiny is your responsibility – this goes with anyone can be anything they want. It is a lie. See previous answer.
Friends are important – no, they are a nice-to-have. They are expensive, time consuming and assume undue influence on your life.
Love conquers all – no it does not.
To give is better than to receive – again not true. As someone who has spent most of her life being told that it is somehow unacceptable to give away my work for a variety of reasons by a variety of unworthy people, I can tell you that giving is often used as a reason for making you feel bad.
It is selfish or negative not to capitulate to a majority in a social situation – nope. I had to again put my foot down today as I was being railroaded. Even working from a chair in your own home involves standing up for yourself, apparently.
Karma – this does not exist. Bad people will probably not ‘get what’s coming to them,’ and as I have hopefully begun to demonstrate, bad people are not necessarily bad if they are simply not doing what you want them to do.
Famous people are special, separate from the rest of the population, more attractive and more pleasant than the rest of the world – no, definitely not. Celebrity ain’t what it used to be, and there does not appear to be a school for gracious stars to tell them how to handle themselves.
Superficially, we seem to be creating a heavily Americanized culture of what I would term obese superficiality, in which we tell each other the same lies every day. Not everyone is going to reach their star, and it is just as well because if they did, it would not be worth reaching. Talent takes work, for most people, and there is a world of difference between someone creating a persona and someone actually having the quality they would like you to believe that they have.
So, what to do when you discover that no part of your life is going to be even slightly pleasant? Change direction. Sometimes the direction will be unclear, sometimes the goal will be blurry, not everything will work out. All you can do is try. I once made the point to a group of students that the emphasis on lending money to small businesses was somewhat spurious, and led to thousands of people a year losing their future prospects to failed ideas. If you reconsider your ideas, generally there is a cheaper way of starting out on almost any project. To demonstrate my point, I started a business with ten pounds, and by the end of four weeks had made eleven hundred.
Flexibility and determination is a lot more important than capital investment. Not believing the bullshit you are fed is more important than blindly believing anything in the hope of gain. Never assume that anything is as it appears, and you will not only become a more critical thinker, but a happier person and then, and only then, we can all get along much better and not sit posting the lies of the powerless rather than actually getting a life.