What this “talent” thing is all about

Let’s take a guy who is really good at wood-work. It could be anything, really, cooking, music, being able to sexually satisfy a woman, but let’s say wood-work. He has what people call a “talent”,which is a word that is like the word “magic”. It’s what people use as a label for that which they do not understand. This “talent” is not, and should not be mysterious at all. To be the genius, skilled wood-worker that he is he needs to have first of all, a desire to make something with wood. That’s it. That’s the primary ingredient in “talent”, the simple need for a table, or a chair, or a dildo for his wife since he lost his penis in the war.

Whatever it is, he wants that thing to come into existence, from a tree. He doesn’t like the idea, he doesn’t want to be considered the Michelangelo of wood, he just wants this thing to exist and it does not, therefore he is obligated to make it. So he tries, and thing he creates doesn’t satisfy him, and he tries to refine it and it’s still not right, he checks out furniture every chance he can, makes a note of the stuff that looks right. He asks questions, stays awake at night thinking about it. He goes back to the drawing-board and he tries some more. The desire just won’t go away.
Eventually, over years of trying, his skills get refined. He becomes a master of the jigsaw and router and whatever else wood-workers use. He knows what methods will work and what won’t work. Then one day he makes a chair that is comfortable. He makes a table with a level surface, he makes a splinter-free phallic object. Not only has he mastered the processes that go into creating that chair, he has found that he can do it again, maybe play with the form a little bit to make it more aesthetically pleasing, more comfortable. He has a set of skills that allow him to do whatever he wants with the material he has chosen to work with.
Most people who set out to do anything don’t want a chair. They don’t realize that that’s where it starts, with a desire for something. They want the money that comes from selling chairs, they want the respect that the master-craftsmen get, they want to be able to talk about chairs and tables and maple-wood sex-toys, but not to make one. Not really. So you get critics and "experts" and teachers, who always outnumber the people who make the product. There are a million music bloggers who own guitars and only a handful of guys who can play a guitar like Brian May, a million web-cam models, but only one Belladonna.

Ten Things That Can Make You Successful

What we have here are some skills and qualities essential for success in life, generally. Sure, they are all unfair, shallow, bigoted, but so are most people. I am not talking about how people should be, I am talking about how people are. These are what you need to climb that ladder to the top. 


1. Looking Good
By "good" I mean attractive. Pretty soon you will be so solidly networked that no mistake will be so bad your buddies won’t cover it up for you. The more people turn to fatty foods and alcohol to comfort them in times of stress (like the cable getting cut off), the harder it gets to find good-looking people, this means that having good looks goes up in value. Good looking people are favored, we all know that, everybody wants to impress them and when they are stupid we pity them, taking an hour of our day to show them how to change their desktop wallpaper. This is in the hope that they will like us ordinary people, like being around us and so that we can either impress (the also ordinary) chicks we want to seduce, or perhaps get a drunk pity-handjob one night after work.


2. Ass kissing expertise
Possibly the best workplace skill anybody can have. The really good ass-kisser can do it without looking like they are doing it, so that their co-workers don’t hate them, and their bosses don’t see the edge of sneaky insincerity that goes through it. When expertly done it can disarm even the most cynical and bitter of employers, even when they know what you are doing. The truth is that your boss secretly believes that he deserves to have his ass kissed, that getting to where he has gotten is worthy of kudos, so even insincere props will generate a positive feeling, and the guy who generates positive feelings is the last person to get fired.


3. Whiteness
This is not some rant about everybody being racist, but the fact is that being white does usually generate positive feelings in the mind of the employer, or at least no negative ones. At worst a white employee starts at zero, whereas a minority has to have a Harvard education to start at zero and sometimes not even then. The reason I can say this isn’t about racism is that this is the case with minority employers too. White people have an air of confidence (often fake)  and the will to take on responsibility that you don’t often get from other cultures, this will has nothing to do with their competence just with the ability to appear competent.


4. Being tall
This is a separate issue from having a pretty face. Being short and pretty means that you are cute if you are a girl, not beautiful, not even "hot", just cute. It permanently limits you to the upper end of mediocrity, in other words. If you are a short guy and you look like Brad Pitt, or Orlando Bloom, you will be attractive only to chicks it is illegal to have sex with. Even adult women who are shorter than you will find you vaguely ridiculous. Eventually you will have to settle for your Sarah Jessica Parker type, who is not all that hot but passably smart, and thinks she is too good for taller, more jock-like types. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, if you are tall, basically, you have a shot at most women.


5. Knowing when to shut up
You don’t have to be smart, you just have to have learned, the way a dog learns, that you should stop talking now. Just knowing how to control your speech and your tendency to share everything can get you looking smarter than you really are. People often assume that the quiet types are smart, also you get the opportunity to listen. Just listening on a regular basis can actually get you information, would would have thought? The more you talk the more tells you give away and the more readable you become.


6. Sharing interests
Know how to pretend that soccer or (insert random social activity) is not the most boring thing ever? So begins your social life. This is similar to kissing ass, but not the same as. This is how you make friends, not ingratiate the boss, unless he happens to be lonely and needs a friend. People like having their hobbies validated by other people, which is why every fucking time-waster on earth has a ten-year-old website attached to it. You want to get "in" with your new co-workers, you just pretend to really like whatever thing they do when they aren’t at work. Cars, swinging, martial arts, WoW, whatever. Pretty soon you will be so solidly networked that no mistake will be so bad that your buddies won’t cover it up for you.


7. Being straight
Everybody knows a gay person, some straight people even have gay friends, it still creeps most guys out, kind of like seeing your dad tweak your mom’s nipple. The thing is that straight men are not usually interested in other men’s anuses, whereas gay men are. The vagina focus versus the guy-anus focus. It is a distinct difference in priorities and that causes a rift. Rifts are not good when you are tying to claw your way to the top of the shit-pile. You want unity and solid tribal narrow-mindedness. Straightness, real or pretend, is like being white (see #3), it gets you starting at zero so that guys don’t get creeped-out picturing where your dick has been.


8. Your accent Educated black Americans learn early on that Ebonics terrify white people, and English-speaking Hispanics learn to speak slowly and loudly in short sentences so that Americans don’t have to ask them shit more than once. Your accent tells people your class and your level of education. No, not really, but people like to think it does since they want to make snap-judgments about strangers.  Snap-judgments make us feel smart and in control. The key is to be able to modify your accent to suit whoever you are dealing with. If you are in the northern part of the USA, you may want to make your Tennessee drawl get thick so that you can become instantly memorable and a "character", whereas in the South you may want sound like a Yankee when applying for a job so that you can sound competent and perhaps get hired.


9. Contacts
99% of all success comes from knowing the right person. You get jobs, meet women, get good weed, get bargains on pretty much everything, if the right person thinks that doing something for you might pay off for them in the future. The key is to find out who you need to know, know the people who can put you in touch with the guy who does this thing, he can help you out.


10. Your parents It’s less about them pushing you to succeed and how much "drive" they instill in you than how driven they themselves were, meaning, how many contacts they have, and most importantly, if they are rich. An unambitious rich kid doesn’t need a whole lot of pushing to stay rich, they can ride on their last name at least to the point of moderate success. Their dad will have done a favor for some guy and that guy will hire them over the heads of better-qualified, more competent applicants and they will get a steady pay check to just coast along rather than have to prove themselves.

The True Secret of Career Success

You happened to work, and you happened to make some money. It's a coincidence. Correlation is not does not imply causation. The attempt to draw a line between the two things, your work and your wealth, is an attempt to validate yourself, to seize credit, glory, to feel like a better man than those who struggle with poverty. There are lots of people who work hard and remain in poverty and there are people who do less work than you do ("less" in effort and "value") and are still better-off than you.

The whole connection between wealth and hard work is a piece of propaganda invented by those who want to make money from your hard labor, like big business and the government. It's a gimmick that is meant to get parents to motivate their kids to enter the line of people who live and die to turn a profit for a handful of billionaires. Instead of the slave-herder's whip you get to be blamed for being poor, and poor is what you are if you do not work.

The possibility of getting rich because you studied the right thing in school and networked with the right people, and worked nights and weekends to impress the the right boss is a gamble like betting your life-savings at the blackjack tables. You might get rich. Or you might just wind up as the reliable mid-level workhorse-type that keeps industry going while a bunch of rich retards (whose families all know each other) purchase gold jewelry for their dogs and Lotus Elises for their 16 year-old kids. Or you might fail on some rung of the ladder and fall into homelessness.

Making money has to do with being liked by the right people. That's it, and you can't control that. The same way that leadership of a county has to do with whether the electorate likes you more than the other guy and not to do with whether you are competent, your career success has to do with you having the right kind of social skills to handle your employer's insecurities, disarm a supervisor's  paranoia about younger, possibly-smarter people. It's about gambling with how you portray yourself to somebody else, the part you play when around them.

Fear, anxiety, and general insecurity are what make leadership effective

Fearful employees work harder, case in point: slavery, and basically every workforce in history prior to the invention of labor unions. Fearful children are not so much of a pain in the ass. Basically, fear has very broad applications across the spectrum of life. Once people are afraid of you, they become more useful.

A fearful populace has to be the most desired thing for men in political office. When the people you govern are consumed with their terrors you don't have to be smart, they won't care about your intelligence, they won't care how corrupt you are, they won't care if you choose young virgins from among the peasants to fuck in your castle. They just want safety, or the illusion of it. Pissing in their pants they will give you the money, the weapons, the approval for anything you want to do if you can tie it to making them safer. Nobody is careful when they are panicking, they don't look closely they don't think clearly, they don't pay attention, they just want to stop being afraid, they have no other goals.

The more you know about the way governments operate, the art of manipulating the masses, the less susceptible you become to fear and the cattle-prods leaders use to motivate. It takes the desire to learn, however. People don't have much of a desire to do anything when they aren't afraid. You can't really motivate a whole population with anything else, definitely not the desire for knowledge. Greed is a close second but there are too many people whose identity is built on resisting it. No, fear is the key to the crowd.

Fear thrives on ignorance an everybody is ignorant of something, on some subjects most or all people are ignorant. This is what you use, this is your kindling. You make up stories about monsters hiding in the dark, under the bed.