9
Bright Ideas to Botch Your Life
© 2004 Colin Pearce
It’s not for the faint hearted.
Read it at your own peril.
Share it with friends at your
own risk.
Bright Idea #1 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING. SAY
NOTHING. BE NOTHING.
Fulfil other people’s expectations and pay no attention
to your own dreams. Be the little boy your mother wanted
you to be. Be the quiet little stay-at-home
serf your husband wants you to be. Be the drunken, drug taking, lay-about that
your stupid friends want you to be. Be an office-bound, bus riding newspaper-reading
little grey person in last year’s suit. Get a house in the ‘burbs,
weed and water the lawn on Saturdays, get an early retirement and hope to win
the lottery but whatever you do – don’t get a passion for the world
and live in it with joy, generosity and genuine self direction.
Keep doing what
you’ve always been doing and keep expecting something to
change in spite of it.
Bright Idea #2 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING ORIGINAL.
Look at another person’s luck, lifestyle and loot and
preoccupy yourself with it until it makes you a total loser.
Try to look like them, talk like them,
spend like them, drink like them, drive like them, debt like them, and sooner
rather than later you will disappear and blend in and come to nothing at all.
You will not be them and you won’t be yourself either.
Whatever you do,
don’t make a list of your own amazing talents and skills
and loves and dreams and start to plan to put them to work. Bright Idea #3 to
Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING ABOUT YOUR MONEY.
If your OUTGO exceeds your INCOME, your UPKEEP will be your DOWNFALLL.
If
you want to be a millionaire, you have to first be an out-of-debt-aire.
Make yourself a deal, ‘I will not debt today.’ And
then get up a plan to pay everyone a little bit until you
are clear of debt. Then when you have
it under control start John Wesley’s plan to build a healthy relationship
with money: Get all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.
Bright
Idea #4 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING FOR YOUR SOUL.
Hey, these days in a politically correct and cynical world, no-one will
talk so directly to you about God except your old pal Uncle Colin so
take one
on the chin from me, OK?
A lot of smarty pants try to tell you the universe
and our world all happened by itself– yeah, right! And the last
Boeing 747 I flew in assembled itself by accident one day from rubbish
blowing across the
Wingfield tip in a stiff
northerly.
Whatever you do, believe the cynics and be a veggie. Don’t
go out one evening and look at the stars – really look. Don’t
stare at a sleeping child – for
a long time. Don’t find a common daisy and study it – really
study it. If you do then just ask all the stupid questions you normally
ask such as ‘How
Come…?’ and ‘Why…?’ and ‘If there’s
a God…’ Please don’t say two things to yourself, ‘Where
there is design there has to be a designer,’ and then say, “Wow!” and
if you do don’t say it in awe and wonder. If you do you’ll
get a new perspective on your relationship with eternity.
Bright Idea
#5 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING FOR YOUR MIND.
Make the newspaper, TV and talk back radio your intellectual Pole
Star.
Hey! If it’s in the paper it has to be true! If they
say it on TV then that’s gospel. If the talk back radio
host says it, then he would know because he is on the radio,
so there! Whatever
you do, don’t go to the
library or the book store and get interested in a wide range of
literature. That is dangerous. You might suddenly find your TV
is a tool of the
network owners
and your newspaper would be put to better use if you wrapped your
veggie scraps in it BEFORE you read it. Then what would you do
all day? Why, you’d have
to think!
Bright Idea #6 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING FOR YOUR
BODY.
Feed your dopey cat and dog a better diet than yourself. They
cost you anything from $10 to $450 to buy and you’re only
worth $100Billion. Because of that you must be able to run on
trash. Buy your pets the canned food with the all
the vitamins and minerals to make their coat shiny but when the
subject of vitamins and minerals in your diet comes up, poo hoo
the idea and say, they are too expensive
and they all flush down the toilet anyway.
If you owned a $25
racing greyhound and the kennel master let it get fat, smoke,
drink alcohol, and gave it no exercise you’d report
him to the RSPCA.
So don’t get a prostate test or a
pap smear, bowel cancer check or mammogram. Don’t regulate
your diet, your exercise or your intake of poisons. You’ll
be right. You’re made of iron, and when the time comes
for you to get your transplant, your fellow citizens will
pay your hospital bills through their health
taxes.
Bright Idea #7 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING FOR
ANYONE.
There is no way you want to stand out from the crowd. Athletes
and horses and actors are expected to be special, different,
extraordinary and make
it worthwhile
betting on their success but you are not supposed to be anything
like that.
You are a drongo. Remember that. You are a middling
little pipsqueak and it would be wrong and out-of-place for
you
to aspire to anything
except
mediocrity. You
are destined to be cold pie, half-baked, warm fish, half
past six and pathetic so have another drink and turn the
telly up
louder.
The place you have chosen for yourself at the bottom
of the heap – or somewhere
in the middle is your best chance at survival.
Whatever you
do, don’t get excited about anything that might improve,
delight and enlighten the world – or your country or
your town or your neighbourhood or your workplace or your
family.
Bright Idea #8 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING WITH
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.
Your father abused you. Your mother used you. Your teachers
ridiculed you. Other kids bullied you. Your DNA mutated before
you were
born. The priest
dobbed your
brother in to the police. Your parents were poor. You didn’t
get an Annie Oakley suit for Christmas. You were spanked
too often. (or you weren’t
spanked enough). The breast fairy brought you two cow’s
udders. The puberty goblin brought you a Tom Thumb tomato
for a willy.
Your job is boring. Your boss is a tyrant. Your
workmates are nincompoops. Your customers are fools. Your
suppliers
are crooks.
The government
is mean. The terrorists
have ruined everything.
This is a good place to be in. Stay
there. You must not accept the maxim in this newsletter and
report that if you could
kick the person
on the
backside who is
most responsible for your troubles you would not be able
to sit down for two
weeks.
Protest about this. Keep arguing. Write and tell me
how you are the victim of other people’s bungles and
that you can do nothing about it. Your bitterness, your stubbornness,
your inflexibility, your hate, your temper, your sulkiness,
your foolishness have nothing to do with your troubles. If
the world were perfect
then you could be happy. I know all about it. I’ve
thrown lots of letters like that in my rubbish bin.
Bright
Idea #9 to Botch Your Life: DO NOTHING WITH YOUR CHARACTER.
Focus all your attention on health and safety, IT systems,
contracts, agreements, output, productivity, work flow, cash
flow, sales,
revenue, dodging taxes,
hiding cash, gadgetry, staff amenities, employee entitlements,
the Christmas booze up
and soft toilet paper.
Debate behaviour modification strategies,
change management, e-business and customer relations but
whatever you do, make
no reference to
character.
These are fuddy-duddy old fashioned Dickensian
ideas and will do nothing for your workplace or productivity.
Character
traits
like
generosity,
humility, honour, loyalty, endurance, forgiveness and joyfulness
come in the employee’s personal
package when they start.
It’s a given.
No one needs to be rewarded or encouraged
in these character traits. Stick to the task of making widgets
go out the door.
Diligence,
discernment, compassion, alertness, contentment and availability
have no place
in a
modern HR management
curriculum.
CONCLUSION:
That’s it. Follow this advice and you’ll botch
your life completely. Look around at someone who is botching
theirs and you’ll
find they have already taken any part of this advice.
Or … you
could just ignore this advice and live happily ever after.
Your choice!
Lots of love
Colin Pearce |
