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.

Good looks mean more than pretty much everything else in life

People look their best between the ages of 19 to 25, after that it’s pretty much all downhill. Often it starts way before the 25. This is the period where you need to start developing a sense of humor and finding out how to be charismatic if you want to be social and move with the cream of the crop. You will need to make money too, because money is like White Out for your personality problems.

Yes, looks matter. How often do you see good-looking homeless people? Never.

I am not saying that this is right, but it does serve a purpose. People who lack in the looks department compensate the way guys with micro-penises compensate. Brett Favre never would have been successful if he was hung like John Holmes. I don’t think that of all the athletes in the all the professional sports’ hall of fames there is one person over 3 inches, and nobody who is particularly good-looking either. Except for maybe Michael Jordan, and he must be the size of a flea.

Anyway, my original point was that youth makes everybody look better than they ever will again. I am just saying that if you are ugly when young you are pretty much screwed and need to start being a really cool person with money.

The Nature of Success

Successful people, or people who think they are successful, all believe that life is a meritocracy because this makes them superior to all of the average people.

Average people want to believe in this principle when they are faced with those who are less-than average, but any such ranking system would indicate that they are inferior to the successful. They can’t admit that so they just don’t think about any of it.

Life is not a meritocracy. It’s not a crap shoot either. Nothing is guaranteed. Lazy people get successful, hard-working people fail and wind up smoking crack in a corner behind the dumpster. Kind people suffer and die and assholes prosper, good guys get shot and bad guys get away with it. Everybody likes to pat themselves on the back and forget the advantages they had and pretend that they got success because they are just too cool to fail.

Everybody alive is more successful than the dead people. That’s how “success” really works. You have no control of anything. People who have money, who have fulfilling and profitable careers, just have not meant the right drunk driver, rapist with AIDS, workplace shooter, or period of suicidal depression due to a malfunctioning brain. If you think any of that is because you are so awesome, remember that the cancer, or one of the aforementioned things is out there, waiting for you. You won’t always be cool.   

Tips For Being Less Ignorant

• You have to admit that you are ignorant
  This is the hardest step and one impossible for genuine morons to complete. You have to actually admit that you don't know something that is worth knowing. Morons tend to fall into a cycle of ego-protection and pretentiousness, so that they never have to admit to anybody just how little they know about anything. The first step to separating yourself from the morons is to be able to accept your shortcomings.
  
• Learn to avoid patterns of ignorance There are educated people everywhere who know nothing about anything that they didn't learn by rote in college. There are people who read the newspapers everyday who can't tell you what they just read or point to Spain on an unlabeled map. Ignorance cannot be eliminated by the consumption of facts. You can only truly learn if you are genuinely interested.
  
  
• Learn a new language
  This opens up a whole world of people to you who don't speak English. Granted, they are mostly hicks, but you get to know what hicks from other places are like. You get to follow any interest you may currently have only in an arena that isn't open to you right now. For instance, Univision has a ton of soap operas.
  
  
• Meet new people I mean new people, not the people at your work-place, not the people you could possibly run into at your local bar. I mean convicts, homeless, illegal immigrants, mercenaries, hookers, senile shut-ins. Talk to them, observe them, mess with their heads.
  
  
• Break your routine Obviously your lifestyle hasn't been helping you break the shackles of dumbness, so you need to do things differently, insert yourself into Navajo culture, watch porn in a language other than English, learn to kill someone with your bare hands. 

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.