It seems that from the moment you’re born, people are telling you crap, they're stuffing crap in every hole, man they are really cramming it in there. It’s coming along as caution, advice, opinion, scare stories, panic, worry, aarrghh! If only they’d stopped, you might have had a chance.
But they probably didn’t and now you’re an adult and crap is pouring out of every hole, (much like when you were a baby). Only by now, you think crap, hear crap, speak crap, watch crap and probably eat crap; but this isn’t a book on healthy eating because that would be adding to the crap. Eating’s easy, right?
You’ve had a really good idea and I mean a really good idea, a ground-breaking, fortune making, incredible idea, but where did it go? You’ve had others too, fantastic ones, large and small, business and personal. Some were a bit wayward, some were off the dial of lunacy but supposing you had managed to try some, or even one of them? Life could have been very different. You could be looking at a very different future right now. If you piled up all the great ideas that have never seen the light of reality, it would make us all very angry; angry for the lost opportunities to try something, prove ourselves and feel great about something we did. So we're going to find the way and break out, and break out with fun!
Because we know what happens, we’ve all been there, that masterstroke of an idea, it was pure genius, it had all the hallmarks for success; originality, simplicity, do-ability, there was probably even a market for it if it was in the business sphere. The truth of all this has been proven, because some other bastard has since done the idea and made it work, sometimes on a scale of international success, sometimes on a smaller stage but either way we briefly despise their very being for having the gumption to do something we didn’t manage. We want to be the ones up there, we want our ideas out there, whether big or small, financial or charitable, business or personal and we really want others to see how great an idea we have. But something has stopped us so far and we’re looking for an answer, not a scapegoat but an answer. Sometimes when making the transition from who you're, to being a super-happy, successful person with life sorted, there seems to be a few distasteful stages to go through and blame might just be one of these. Nobody wants to admit to looking for someone to point the finger at, but damn!, it makes us feel better for a while. It eases the disappointment a bit, sometimes quite a lot. Hell, we’re as human as everyone else, after all we like fried chicken as much as the next guy, (or maybe fried chicken veggie substitute - each to their own). So maybe if that’s the current stage, it needs to be worked through. It does make you bloody tired though, and it would be great to get through it quickly and clamber out the other side.
It’s all the conflict, all the bloody earnestness that does you in, it’s so knackering. All the trying to do two things at once with three different ideas and having no real idea who the fuck we're anyway and how we’re supposed to behave and what to do next. Surely it doesn’t have to be like that? There are others you know, other types, weirdos who don’t have the same constant monologue of different voices shouting rubbish in their heads, switching ideas and plans at every turn. You’ve seen them, serene, shiny, successful beings who are getting on with things in their world, and not just getting on with things, but also being successful whatever their version of that is and not just getting on with things and being successful but getting on with things and being successful and bloody well enjoying themselves as well.
How did they learn to do it? What’s different about them? How come they can do it and we can’t... yet. They’ve got it though, haven’t they? It’s almost indefinable but they’ve got it and we want it and some how we're going to hunt it down and no amount of difficulty or hiding the secrets or wrapping up the truth is going to stop us.
So the hunt is on, we’re ready, adrenaline primed and sweaty, with hearts pounding, although that might be the coffee or the coke, because every great assault on life starts with one, maybe two, possibly three shots just to get the brain in gear and the cogs working. That’s how it is isn’t it? So we’re psyched, because the prize looks huge, it’s going to be amazing and we're going to feel like GODS!
Just a quick bit of domestic shit to sort out first, clear the decks as it were. We said we’d do it and blah blah, it’ll be much less hassle to just do this one thing first and then sort life out. Got to get your priorities sorted, after all...
It’s proving quite tricky this sorting life out, in fact it's proving monumentally tricky! We keep making changes, we act on advice, we get mentally fired up and push ourselves to do stuff that we really don’t feel like doing, but the results seem quite negligible, there’s no real appreciable difference in the way things end up. And then after a while, it seems that has dwindled down, and what the hell was it that was going to be so great anyway? That idea we had was never going to work, another hair-brained scheme, crack-head stuff!! Honestly, we’d better snap out of all this mucking around with crap we don’t know about and get on with what we do know. After all everyone else around us is doing that aren’t they? Let’s have a go at that because they’re happy right? They’ve got a good handle on things, life’s looking good and they even have time to watch TV and go on package tours and hoover the car on Sunday morning. Man! Our lives are a mess of half-finished projects and half-baked ideas and no future at all.
It’s going to take something radical to get from here, to over there, that Great Life where we want to be, but what? Change the way we do things?
Maybe we could change, if we had an example to follow? So there’s a glimmer of hope, someone we know seems to be breaking out, they’re doing something right under our very noses and it is going to be the answer. They are absolutely certain of it. It’s going to be just the thing to get them where and what they want, and it’s going to happen in time for us all to see it. The party starts, the dreams are brought back out of the cupboard, promises are made and smiles fill every room in the house. We’re there. We’re right there, faces pressed against the glass, squinting to take in every piece of progress, ready to imitate to the letter. The grass starts to grow up around our feet as we wait for great news of the new life having arrived. It’s getting embarrassing hanging off the windowsill week after week, can’t they hurry up and get there. We want to imitate!! We want what they promised each other, we want what they want and frankly waiting any longer is an idea that pisses us off. It pisses them off too and the dreams are hurled, into the garden with the full strength of an angry mob, left to rot. Bugger! That was supposed to be our ticket out, some info on how to do it, how to have an idea, formulate a plan and emerge full of the expectation of life being fun and what we want it to be. Others around try it too, at various stages in the year. It’s your year; and they are sodding around taking their time about it!
We want the answer but enthusiasm starts to be overshadowed by the embarrassment of being the gawping guy, always asking questions, always looking on. But how the hell else are we going to find the answer?
And what happens when it all stops? The energy for trying things disappears from your group, your circle, and then what? The bastards have baled out, they gave up, they talked the talk and then gibbered excuses and then stopped talking altogether and now have settled for a different plan to the one you want, in truth from the one they want, which is no problem except you now have no-one to learn from, no-one to study, no-one to imitate.
Okay, okay, let’s not panic here; there is still an answer. We know we learn by example but the examples we’re being given aren’t leading to the result we want. We know that for certain, we’ve been watching them for twenty years! Okay so maybe there’s a little bit of panic. They were our hope, our assurance, our promise, they were supposed to be paragons of success for us to follow but they blew it, they blew it right out of their ass and even though we still love them, there’s less to say each time we meet. But the truth is the truth, and the truth is that we have lost our examples to learn from. So we're going to have to try something new. So what do we need? Think!
"Stick with the matter in hand! but alright we’ll put the kettle on while we think. Right, think!"
"Lovely, thanks. Right, where the fuck were we?"
"Well that’s not too bad a place to be.... is it?"
"Fuck the biscuits! We want a new life, not fucking biscuits. We want a fantastic life, a Great Life and we want someone to help us, to show us how, we want ..... a new set of people around us. The successful sort. The ones who know. The ones that are doing the stuff, actually working the plan, making it happen, and making it look really cool, not giving up".
"Cool and Ciao!"
"Cool, Ciao and Sexy".
"I think we’re looking at reincarnation".
"Get hit by a truck?"
"Yeah, just falls off the fucking page".
We’ve always felt like that, it’s just normal - the mice, weasel, lost in life bit, not the wide-eyed, jerky, caffeine junkie, that’s new. That’s quite new and quite nice really, it keeps us in the game, 'live to fight another day' and all that.
There’s a surge of anger as the sugar leaves the system but the coffee lingers in the veins.
"... we want to fucking win!" "Where the hell were we? Oh yeah, the way we feel, the way we’ve felt for longer than we can ever remember. In fact we can’t ever remember it being any different. We want to be swamped with sunny memories of triumphs not to be wallowing about in rambling thoughts of wondering what the hell we're doing”.
"Well maybe, there’s a bit of self-pity in there, discoloring a few triumphs but there’s not enough cards in there to play the trump. We want to switch that round, we want so many positive memories and feelings to call on that when we have the opportunity to behave like mice, we shout: FUCK IT! FUCK BEING A MOUSE! FUCK IT ALL!"
"Who cares, it’s got to make you feel better. Shouting always does. Look at the Spanish, they live longer than almost any other European nation and they’re shouting at the tops of their voices 24/7".
"Great plan, except we’ve moved how many times in the last 12 years? We’ve lost count, just like we’ve lost count of the jobs we’ve had in that time and the amount of projects we've started and the number of hair-brained bloody schemes we’ve tried".
"Fuck! Is there really, a chip for each one?"
"I don’t think shoulder chips are the french fry sort"
"Crikey!"
"Fuck knows".
"Debacle! Where do we come up with words like that from! We don’t speak like that, we don’t think like that, we don’t even watch ponsy dramas with stuff like that in, its all in there somewhere though isn’t it? Where the hell has it come from?"
"No, no, no; there is head fuckage of a much higher order than filling your brain with useless nonsense. That we could probably cope with, once we’d got over the downright rage we have for all the wasted time spent reading crap, listening to crap, watching crap and then passing on the same crap..."
"Right, so back to the shiny, successful people, surely they have been through the same things, disappointments, failures, realizing their idea wasn’t even crazy or unworkable but downright, utter bollocks, although, maybe they don’t see it that way".
"Fuck knows but we have seen them all like that and we don’t feel like the people we want to so something must be different, wouldn’t you say".
"Right so let’s pretend that some of the ideas and plans and so on had been successful, that some of the people we’d met were more like us, that the things we're disappointed about, aren’t quite the way we see them".
"Fuck that. Maybe we’d feel differently about everything!! If we stop running those videos and play some new ones, new ones where we’re Steve McQueen, James Bond, Darth-Fucking- Vader if we want, whatever the result is we’re looking for, maybe we’d feel more like the people we want to. What do you think?"
"I am and thank you for pointing it out because now we know there is an answer".
"Whatever it takes, my , whatever it takes".
"Totally, that’s what a head full of crap will do. There’s millions of studies to prove it".
"But how do we get them? Think, damn you!"
"...loads more shit to fill our heads with. We need to see it for ourselves, we need to do it, try it, taste it, live it, breathe it".
"Looks like that to some people doesn’t it?"
"Yeah me too. But not to the people doing it. It’s real to them and I bet people don’t take the piss so much when you're happy and successful, living the life you want, the way you want, believing in yourself".
"You know if we take the piss out of the people we want to be, we're really in trouble".
"The truth can be such a bastard".
"I think we were saying that maybe they look at it all differently, maybe just maybe they don’t pop out the other side of a failed idea and say what a butt monkey, I can’t even ...."
"Okay, good example, maybe they are successful people then, but perhaps you're gonna have to have a few failures first. Authors for instance who had an idea and went with it and made it work big time, bestseller list and all that, I wonder if they wrote some others first that flopped and are now propping up wonky table legs in their basement flat".
"Probably not I guess, once you’ve started to be successful on your plan, I suppose you just keep going and feel more fantastic as it goes along".
"Oh yeah, a few ups and downs, bio-whatsit-rythyms and all that".
"Bollocks we do, otherwise how the hell did everyone start who hadn’t been successful at something?"
"Uhuh, I don’t think so, I think they kept going until they had been successful".
"Yeah and I know it hasn’t worked, not for us, not for everyone we know and not for everyone around us who isn’t doing things the way they want. It’s just more crap on top of the crap: you're told by swindlers ans clowns that it will be too difficult, it’s a saturated market, it’ll be too painful if you fail, you’ll look a right twat if you put everything into something and end up falling on your ass!"