10 Ways to Be Miserable and Fail at Everything, Guaranteed
A systematic approach with a 100% success rate.
Real quick, not subscribed yet? It’s free.
Also, here are other featured publications of mine from this month:
- The Art of Letting Go: How Non-Resistance Can Ignite Your Growth - Published by Curious
- Ruthless Elimination of the Unnecessary - Published by Illumination
- 3 Self-Mastery Life Skills: That Everyone Needs and No One is Taught in School - Published by Mind Cafe
- 7 Myths That Sabotage Your Meditation Practice - published by Mind Cafe
- The 5 Stages of Meditation: Understand Many Methods and Guide Yourself - published by Illumination
Check them out if you haven’t read them yet. And thank you for your support.
Now onto some bad advice.
Want to lose all your money?
Burn your bridges, kill your relationships, and lose touch with others?
Want to torment yourself into misery?
I can help.
I put together this list of 10 things you can do today, and every day, to be the most miserable and pitiful version of yourself.
These strategies are sure to attract rescuing attention and ruin everything you do.
I don’t want you to spend another minute feeling anything less than unstable, so let’s get right into them!
Way #1: Find out what’s important for you by opening your Email, Slack, or Teams.
We’re not all morning people.
We don’t all wake up with clarity on what’s most important to us.
And you shouldn’t.
Writing down your goals the night before is a waste of time and just pretending that you have free will.
So, don’t worry if you don’t know what’s most important for you to do today.
Just check your Email, Slacks and Teams if you have it.
Ideally, you’re checking all 3 all of the time.
And then check Messenger, WhatsApp, and Discord, too.
Create a symphony of notifications if you can.
They’ll tell you—they have a plan for you.
They know where you want to go and they know what’s going to help you get there in your idiosyncratic way.
And this will also help you accomplish #2.
Way #2: Start your day by filling your brain up with as much information as quickly as possible.
Do you ever wake up without an alarm and remember your dreams?
Don’t do that.
They’re distractions.
In fact, chances are, each thought rattling around in your head that someone else didn’t put it there is a distraction from how you can be more productive, hustle harder, and be more deserving of other people’s approval.
Your ideas just seem important, because they’re the only thoughts swimming around in that fishbowl of a head of yours.
But really, that fishbowl is running on empty and you need to fill it up with information, news, stories, and social media as quickly as you can.
In a perfect world, you spend the first 30 minutes upon waking up scrolling social media with the sound on. Bonus points if you can keep it going while you brush your teeth, and before and after your shower.
If you’re wiping water off your hands so you can turn a screen on, then you know you’re really optimized and seizing the day.
When you feel like you’re already overwhelmed and you need a second coffee to help you actually get started doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing—then you know you’ve done it right.
At this point, you should already be very successful at what you do just by following these first 2 tips.
So the other 8 ways are really just bonuses and overkill. but I’ll share them anyways because I want you to win!
Way #3: Remember that it’s more important what you do than how you do it.
There is a perfect thing for you to do right now.
If this was Groundhog Day, you could live today over and over again and you would eventually learn the perfect thing to do today to transform your 3-year goals into today's goals.
And it doesn’t matter how you do it, it just matters that you do it.
So, have that important conversation, don’t worry about what’s said or how it’s said.
Launch that venture, let it all ride or die on this one shot, regardless of how well you execute it or not.
And if you at all care about what you do, you better do it fast.
A slow job is just a job that killed 3 others.
Rush it if you really care about it.
Way #4: Enjoy the fantasy more than progress.
When you think about where you should be in life, compare yourself to where you think you should be.
Compare yourself now to the most glamorous version of your potential.
And remind yourself how far you have left to go.
Then numb yourself to that pain.
And when you meet others, don’t accept them as they are.
Compare them to you, and compare them to your potential and who you could be one day.
If you’re a writer, spend your time telling others you are. If you’re an entrepreneur, be sure others know you are. Dress like one.
Require a lot of preparation to be yourself.
Cast a wild and inspiring vision and never forget it.
Compare everyone and everything you meet to your vision and criticize everything.
Let everyone and everything know how they can be better.
If something can be better, it should be better, and you should not know peace until it is.
Your vision is more important than any insignificant progress you make each day. Just keep imagining where you’re going and who you’re going to be one day.
Close your eyes to reality as it is now—the only thing that matters is your vision–and you should keep walking towards it even if your shoes are untied.
Way #5: Look up to others so they can look down on you.
Everyone who matters to you should be put on a pedestal.
That’s how you know they’re important to you.
You need to look up to them so they can look down on you.
You’ve got to get up there, to them. You don’t need to know how, or even what the real differences between you and your heroes are.
You just need to know that they’re above you.
And that one day, you’ll be welcomed by them.
They’ll see you the closer you get and the longer you push that boulder uphill, and then it will be worth it.
And you know that because you…
Way #6: Know that the harder something is, the more worth it is.
You question yourself a lot on the journey because you’re wise.
But there’s one piece of wisdom you cling to more than any other, and even when you question everything else about yourself and your reality, this piece of wisdom is never shrugged off…
Hard work leads to success.
Anything worth doing is not going to be easy.
If something is easy, it’s a trick.
If we get something without working hard for it, we don’t deserve it and we should feel guilty.
The more guilty we feel in this moment, the better others will know we really are.
Remember, you have to earn it so you can be proud and have something to say.
If you don’t tell others how hard you worked for it, they may judge you for it.
You have to protect yourself.
If you doubt yourself, or that something is right for you, you should push harder. You should try harder. You should bend reality to make your dreams come true.
Reality is incorrect and needs to be altered to be acceptable.
You should wrangle from reality what you want—you are infallible in your desires.
If you aren’t sure you want something, you should work harder for it. Then you know you’ll deserve it.
The more you sacrifice, the more you toil, and the more you’ll enjoy the journey and finish it.
Way #7: Delay happiness and satisfaction until you deserve it.
That’s why you should delay happiness and satisfaction until the end of that hard work when you really deserve it.
Those feelings are just going to get in the way of what you need to be doing and your work.
There will be a time and place for you to feel good, but it’s not here.
And it’s definitely not now.
It’s called fulfillment because you are empty and you need to work hard to create what’s going to make you happy and satisfied.
Which is why it’s okay that you feel miserable along the way.
You have a hole inside of you.
And you shouldn’t worry about it, because it won’t affect the quality of what you’re doing in any way or the impact you make on others.
You’ll find or make what fills the hole inside one day and until then you’re supposed to feel empty and unhappy.
That’s normal—everyone feels that way.
Way #8: Remember you have nothing to lose.
That hole inside is there for a reason.
You have nothing to lose.
You’re doing this to get something remember?
You don’t have anything right now of value. No relationships, no possessions, no potential.
Just an empty hole walking around and catching wind like an old bottle.
So, give it all for what you want to do.
The more you give, the more likely it is to work out for you.
Everything is worth sacrificing if it helps you accomplish what you think your goals are in the way you think is best to achieve them.
And the more sacrifices you make along the way, the bigger the reward you’ll get in the end.
If you manage to work harder than anyone else, for longer, and sacrifice more along the way, then you are basically strong-arming the universe into giving you what you want.
And if that doesn’t work then it simply is not possible.
Way #9: Try a few times and then do something else.
Once you’ve worked as hard as you can and sacrificed as much as possible, you can feel certain knowing that it’s just not possible, or not possible anymore.
And those who have been able to do it are just lucky or born rich.
So, if you’re not either of those, the best thing you can do is try your own luck.
Roll the dice.
And keep rolling them off the table.
It’s not about what you’re doing it’s about how much you’re risking.
It’s all about luck.
If there’s something you feel intrinsically drawn towards doing, that you would do for free, that you could see yourself doing every day for the rest of your life, because it gives you happiness and satisfaction in the moment…
That’s okay I guess, but if it doesn’t work out for you in the first few tries, don’t waste time trying to make what you love work.
You’re not smart enough for that.
Life doesn’t work like that.
Instead, life is more like a big casino and we all take chances and it works out for some and then they write about it, and for the rest of us?
We can just hope to copy those who it does work out for.
Eventually, the odds will come up in our favor, right?
Way #10: Imitation is the quickest path to being accepted by others.
Nothing matters.
Everything is trivial, and everything means the same thing to everyone.
Sometimes, things trend—you should do those things.
That matters.
If you ever think it’s about the person, the relationships, who you can help and how—don’t.
It’s not about that stuff.
And it’s definitely not about you, your stories, your wisdom, and how you can use it to help others.
It’s about the words you use and the order you put them in on the screen.
In fact, you matter so little you should outright copy others down to their words.
It’s all just letters, and words and somehow people get meaning out of certain combinations of them.
You don’t even have to be the one to do it.
You can get Chat GPT to choose the words and order them for you.
That’s why it’s so revolutionary and you are so lucky that you get to access it.
Because it’s all about the words, and the formulas you can fill in.
There’s no such thing as purpose, there’s no such thing as a positive change, or making an impact.
No such thing as lessons you need to learn in life.
Or who you are capable of becoming, and who that version of you is able to help.
If you ever get confused, just remember that it’s about tricking strangers on the internet.
If you struggle to do that, you can buy Mad-Libs for adults that will help you do it in a paint-by-numbers fashion.
Don’t worry about the impact you make. Don’t worry about the promises you make.
Don’t even think about your goals or what you can do to increase your chances of achieving them. Don’t worry about skills, or getting help.
If you do anything different than others you’re dooming yourself.
You might even inextricably burst into flames.
Obviously, if they’re doing it it’s working.
The only thing that matters is if it’s working or not.
And if not, you need to give up and try something else.
Dip your feet in before you dive.
And ask yourself, how are you going to change yourself to fit 2023’s idea of success?
----
Learning what to do by learning what not to do.
It’s hard to go online without getting an overwhelming amount of conflicting advice about success.
Or being at peace.
Or being happy.
There are many contradicting ideas about what it means to be human, let alone a happy or ‘successful’ one.
Because there are just as many ways to do that as there are people.
So, that’s the big hint.
You don’t need 10 ways, or 100.
Just the 1 single way that is most aligned with you.
Who you are and who you are becoming.
And only you can determine what that is for you.
You are different, and so you don’t need everyone else’s strategy.
You just need to know who you are, and how to be yourself.
Which is an art you are the only expert of.
—
I had a lot of fun writing this.
And thanks for letting me get away with it.
I will say though, it is shocking how close sometimes parody gets to the truth.
So, hopefully, there was one lesson or laugh in this article that was worth it for you.
👉 And if you enjoyed it, I would appreciate it if you dropped a ❤️ heart, commend, shared, or recommended it with others.
That’s how these stories reach people.
I appreciate your support. Thanks!