Saturday, June 16, 2018

1:00 AM | The Most Successful People I've Met

By Nick Mamatas

Response to a tweet by @APompliano that read:
The most successful people I've met:
1. Read constantly
2. Workout daily
3. Are innately curious
4. Have laser focus
5. Believe in themselves
6. Build incredible teams
7. Admit they know very little
8. Constantly work to improve
9. Demand excellence in everything they do

The most successful people I've met:

1. Have well-connected parents
2. Who are also wealthy
3. And work in a related field
4. But have a different surname
5. Which allowed my successful acquaintances to "come out of nowhere"
6. Because that's a feature hook
7. Easily arranged

The next most successful group:

1. Married someone
2. With no goals of their own
3. Who are happy to be secretary
4. And valet
5. And unidirectionally monogamous
6. And crawl off silently after separation
7. When the successful person trades up to a better servant

The third group:

1. Are good at quantitative reasoning
2. Read a lot
3. Work sixty-hour weeks
4. Spend their energy covering for their incompetent bosses
5. Usually burn out at 40
6. Grow a stupid beard
7. Can't even get laid at Burning Man
8. Accidentally tweet porn at 3am

The fourth group:

1. Are immigrants
2. From countries with authoritarian governments
3. Who don't like to talk politics
4. Because their parents were part of the regime's intellectual elite
5. And have nicknames like "The Bloodthirsty Tiger"
6. And that $800 handbag is too cute

The fifth group:

1. Are utterly unexceptional
2. worked hard
3. got injured in car accident or fall
4. or were racially/sexually abused by bosses
5. and kept their mouths shut for once, didn't say "partially my own fault"
6. got a big settlement
7. blew it starting a small press

The last group:

1. worked pretty hard
2. got lucky with timing, then
3. coughed hard once and up came some blood
4. or experienced bad thoughts about their phones
5. vanished for years
6. took the bus once; recognized me
7. I said "How you've been?"
8. "Oh God, Nick, oh God."

Everyone else pretty much just has something on SoundCloud and wrote a book you've never heard of.

Labels: poetry

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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