Have Potential
One of the most damaging statements in my life was “You have potential…” It can lead to unrelenting self-imposed pressure, nullifying my modicum of supposed talent with the obsessive compulsion to be perfect. To live up to your full potential.
Procrastinate
Believe it or not, a fear of failure can lead to not wanting to start. Being “productive” can simply be a delaying tactic. Finding urgent but not important tasks to fill your time until your deadline looms to such a malevolent degree that the pressure is high enough to spur you into action. Rather be effective.
A Failure to Plan
Creativity is chaos, and from this chaos is born the universe of possibility and innovation. But even the chaos of the Big Bang resulted almost immediately into some form of order, rampant energy fell into the restricted boxes of atoms, forces that became our laws developed, such as the far-reaching and insatiable pull of gravity. The human mind craves order, a sense of balance. Wanting to plan, knowing the merits, but failing to plan, is (however trite this may sound) planning to fail. Some creative types (myself the mascot of this doomed team) enjoy the chaos, the feeling of energy, and the lack of restraint.
To avoid success, avoid goals long term and short, avoid measurement and feedback, avoid structure and focus. Avoid planning.
Berate yourself
Criticize your every failing, suck the wind right out of your sails, rain in on your own parade. No-one knows better than you how to poop your own party. Build a mountain of could haves, should haves, insults and dismissals and then bury yourself underneath it.
If you start don’t finish
Clutter your life and mind with half started, half finished dreams. The undead leftovers of unsubstantiated vision, given only enough life to mindlessly dog your every move gnawing at the edge of your hoarding memory.
Fcuk the basics
Forget, circumvent, under appreciate, “Know better”. Nothing assures failure, avoids success or marries you and mediocrity like reaching for the stars while standing on hot air. Conventions, norms , tried and tested, the common theory, the rules waiting to be broken. Flaunt them, break them, resist them – while never understanding nor building on them is a great way to avoid success.
Rely on Midnight Memory
Great insights often come at mundane, sometimes inconvenient moments. Both buoyancy and relativity were supposedly born in the bathroom, in a bath and a shower respectively. When you relax and remove yourself from the situation, your mind often provides the answer that your were fighting for. This is why lying in bed, dozing off, idea after idea line up in single file and present themselves and their cases to your semi-slumbering consciousness. Great ideas can often present themselves, just after you’ve gotten into the bath, the shower, sat down of the toilet. Just after you’ve switched off the lights, stumbled into bed and gotten comfortable. But never fear, don’t write it down, you’ll remember it in the morning – guaranteed. To avoid success never keep a pen and pad of paper handy on your bedside table.
Get Addicted to Information
We live in a consumer driven world. We consume. Everything. Al Gore’s says too much. I agree. We also have become addicted to the consumption of semi-pertinent, semi-useful, free and boundless information. Become a constant Wikipedia surfer or rampant Stumbler if you want to avoid success. Abuse these wonderful tools to magical waste potential productive free time.
People say knowledge is power – Bruce Lee said “The correct use of knowledge is power.” We know he kicked ass. Information is not even knowledge yet, it’s 1’s and 0’s, on and off. No meaning without focus, purpose, context and application. So subscribe to the newsletter, and this free information service about that hobby that you thought you might try, or surf a few blogs and subscribe to 30 or 40 feeds. Read them everyday, along with your mountains of joke e-mail, print spam, download everything, never throw away any article. You might just re-read it. Or better yet save so much, that you get to sort it out so that it is manageable, making numerous well-thought out and ultimately useless little folders – filled to the brim with stuff you’ll never read.
A little bit of knowledge is dangerous but a lot of information is fatal.
Ride it till it dies
Don’t exercise, eat well, sleep enough or relax ever. Take any machine fail to maintain it, run it on inferior fuel, never let it cool down and always over rev it.
Its bound to succeed for a while.
Your creative mind is in no way connected or effected by the host which carries it, feeds it, protects it, cleans it or connects it to the world it wished to change. Balance is evil. Avoid it like the plague if you want to avoid success.
Be inconsistent
Be unreliable, unpredictable, non-committal, shatter promises, and never ever try to improve. Head in every direction at once! Multi-task till you can do 20 things at once and finish none. Under-perform, over-promise, under-deliver. Be an enigma, unto yourself and others. Trust is overrated. Zig and zag through life, detour from the yellow brick road towards every shiny object. Focus? Rather spread yourself too thin. Never say what you mean or mean what you say. Just do it, just be, different, every time.
Self-Belief
Last but not least, don’t believe in yourself, listen to your critics, they know you better than you do.
PS. This article was written from the stance that, I know more about “How not to succeed” than I do about success. I have noticed, from personal experience, the above ways to avoid success. The article is thus a guide to fail, written to inspire you to resist and try the opposite.
