| by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Actung! Warning! Cuidado! The world's foremost authorities on what constitutes success have released their long-awaited report. It is a blockbuster, an astonishing tour de force on what really constitutes success and failure. This astonishing report, an eon or two in the making, drawing as it does from the circumstances and life paths of people worldwide, delivers its grave conclusions with a plethora of detail previously only hinted at; so explosive are these findings for you and for people worldwide who, until this very minute, have been kept from them by a worldwide conspiracy. Thus the publication of these findings is not only an act of intellectual boldness but of actual physical courage and pluck. Now we know, for a certainty, what truly constitutes success and what we must do at once. 1) Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous to your health. Among the report's most revolutionary conclusions is that the shear act of getting out of bed is perilous to your health and very existence. For instance: 100% of the people who get up this morning, who dare to put feet into bunny-slippers, will die. Thus, the researchers delivering this now irrefutable truth, are adamant: if you wish to be healthy, indeed even keep life, you must not, cannot and always should not even get out of bed at all. You now have this on the highest authority. Bad things happen to those who get up! 2) Shocking but true. Avoid taking a shower, sprucing yourself up, dressing up, even dressing at all. All and every one of these actions is dangerous to your health. Indeed these courageous researchers go farther: they each individually and all collectively result in certain death! No wonder, they aver, conspirators have been keeping these explosive findings from us! 3) Don't prepare an agenda or to-do list for today. In a conclusion sure to roil old-time success advocates, it is now known that 100% of people resorting to the use of preparatory notes, check- and to-do lists and business aide memoires will, day by day, be wiped out . This is now unarguable. 4) Get rid of your positive attitude. Another seismic conclusion for the people worldwide who embrace the Cult of Success: drop your positive attitude at once. The short term- effects of a positive, can-do attitude are hazardous; the long-term effects are terminal. Your positive attitude could, indeed most likely would, place you in the closest possible proximity to other positively attituded people worldwide, thereby compounding the effects of this condition. For example, It is well-known that people in business with positive attitude will a) attract people to you b) cause these people to do business with you, thereby increasing your (always undesirable work load), and c) result in the acquisition of money which further increases your work load. One, after all, cannot merely have money; one must work to determine what to do with it. And the punishing effects of all this work add up: work to get it, work more to invest it, work still more to handle the increasing wealth begat by this demanding increasing wealth, the whole a burdensome, staggering amount of work -- and all easily avoided. Researchers are clear and adamant: for real success, JUST SAY NO! Save your life; don't lift a finger on your own behalf, much less for anyone else, any one at all. Remember, you are in this life for yourself and yourself only; even your "nearest and dearest", are really nothing more than cannon fodder. (But don't let them known, lest their generosity to you stop at once and absolutely.) 5) Never, ever offer your business prospects and clients a good offer, much less a superior knock-their-socks-off offer. Why? Because they might take it... and that would never do. After all, you'd then have to do the work, not least having to cater to them and all their quaint, whimsical notions about what constitutes proper and acceptable customer service. And this will, as stated, never do, for they too are nothing more than a necessary evil. Researchers have now shown conclusively that the correct, more eminently sensible way to a handle these pests is to promise everything while delivering nothing. The researchers pointed out that a good many businesses, even the most renowned and long-standing, already do this with (so they report) happy impunity. They are and truly in the vanguard, and their notable effects on behalf of customer (dis) service are hereby noted -- and praised. These titans set the trend for us all. 6) Never return a phone call. For this too increases your already rocketing out of control work load. Here the researchers remind us: 100 per cent of working people, the more so every small and home-based business owner, reports stress. Medical researchers are clear that there is a stress-related component in virtually every human illness. Thus, work is the truest cause and reason for human ailments and demise. The strongest possible action is immediately necessary to combat these trends and fight human morbidity. Thus, stop placing and stop answering phone calls at once. Now hear this: EVERY time you place or return a phone call you are initiating a process that increases your already aching work load. Again the stress factor is not only apparent; it becomes determinative as the number of such calls increase. As your usage of these becomes paramount, the inherent destructive effects become uncontrollable and destructive. You no longer work the machine; the machine works you... right into stress, disability, and the certainty of an early demise where only the heirs to your earthly fortune are contented. As the researchers make clear, cease and desist and so save yourself -- your progeny to perdition 7) Never say "thank you" and never, ever "give back". To lead the most perfect of lives, to achieve the quintessence of success, there are, so researchers emphatically point out, things you must do (e.g."avoid all work for yourself; delegate lavishly to others".) and -- even more importantly -- things you must never do. Here are two of the most important of the latter: Never say thank you to anyone at any time for any reason. Saying thank you is not only a task, and all tasks, whether menial or significant, should be discarded as energy draining and unproductive. Moreover, to say thank you to others opens a Pandora's box of woes... not the least of which is that a thank-you in any form becomes a standing invitation for the person being thanked to ask you for something, thereby increasing your always uncongenial work-load. Don't go there, for there lie dragons. Finally, never "give back". Researchers have deduced, in one of the most breathtaking of their findings, that the successful hoard, not disperse; they hide resources, never disclosing; they are adept at asset shuffling, never asset donating. And you must be the same... for to start on the road of "giving back" will inexorably lead others to expect, implore and even insist that you do so; thereby diminishing the mountain of property you have created for yourself alone, any other use being inimical to your own best interests. By following these entirely frank, candid, insightful observations on the true realities of success, you will truly be a success, the very acme of what you can be. Such an event needs a celebration and such a celebration needs a great voice to do you homage. I have invited signature crooner Bing Crosby to serenade you. Look in any search engine for "Swinging on a Star" from the 1941 film "Going My Way". Oh yes, by following the researchers' recommendations, you'll surely swing... but not on a star. For der Bingle was right, all the monkeys don't live in the zoo... |
