“Today is the first day to the rest of your life”

It isn’t. Stop lying to yourself, you’re smarter than that.

This quote bothers me particularly when combined with any of the “carpe diem” variants. While today is TECHNICALLY the first to the rest of your life, it could also be the second, third, or 84th. And while you’re sitting there musing about a new beginning, your subconscious is busy with the following messages:

1) Stop lying to me, yesterday feels exactly the same as today.
2) Everything you have accomplished up to this point has been pretty much practice.
3) What about tomorrow’ Is that the second day, or are we starting over AGAIN?
4) Stop lying, there’s no real difference.
5) You just weren’t good/important/special enough the last 7300+ days, but today might be different.
6) Essentially you’ve accomplished nothing worthy of keeping so far.
7) Seriously, stop lying.

New beginnings are a nice place to retreat to when we don’t feel good about ourselves, but it’s by far not the best place to go. Don’t forget that starting over is probably the hardest things anyone can do (if it’s even possible), and that beginnings are usually the most difficult part of any process.

Routine is not always a bad thing, being in the middle at least suggest that you have less than the full path to go. If we believe in the Chinese adage “A good beginning is the half of success”, then you’re essentially taking a 50% chance of messing up the rest of your life, EVERY DAY.

Do you really want that kind of odds?

“Live every day like it’s your last.”

Don’t do this. Seriously. It was my philosophy for about 6 months straight, and I have to tell you, it doesn’t work out well.

I’ve heard it time and again from the best self help “gurus”– love like you’ll never get another chance, tell the people around you that you love them, try all the things you want to try before your dead.

Seems like good enough advice, doesn’t it? After all, we never know when we?ll kick the bucket, and you don’t want to lie on your deathbed thinking how you wasted your chance at calling that ex-girlfriend and telling her you really didn’t mean it when you called her a c-nt.

Instead, why not treat EVERY day like it’s your last? See beauty, hug loved ones, stop working that dead-end job, and start LIVING YOUR DREAM! When you prepare for the worst, you live out the best. In this mind-frame, you live your life FULLY, isn’t that a good thing?

Short answer: No.

Chances are, you’ll be preparing for something that won’t be coming for another 30 or 40 years. Modern sciences is an annoying little bugger, and it’s great at keeping people from drawing their last breath. Living your life expecting death is an attempt to scare yourself into action, but ultimately, you’ll find that fear-driven responses is like that final shot of tequila before you’re at the point-of-no-return– it seems like a good idea in the short run until your senses catch up with you.

Your first week will be great. You’ll look at everything in a new light, you’ll feel more connected to your loved ones, you’ll appreciate your surroundings, you’ll go on picnics. Unfortunately, after your first week reality kicks in. You see, human beings are creatures of routine, 14 days is all it takes for us to get used to a new environment or mindset, regardless of the situation. It’s how survivors can handle long periods of being stranded on an island and how concentration camp inmates handle hard labor. We set up a routine and get used to it.

When you get used to death, that’s the honeymoon period ends– the jolt stops kicking in, your kids begin to get tired of you hugging them all the time (“It’s embarrassing, my friends are here!”), and worst of all, the previous routine that you worked so hard to set up dissipates evenly into your prepared last will and testament.

At the end of the day, do you really need death to remind yourself how to live? How about fulfilling your potential because, well, you can?

Winning isn’t everything, part 2

I’ve been insistent on staying away from politics, but I thought this is such an exceptional example of the previous post (Winning isn’t everything, CLAIMING victory is) I just have to post it.

The presidential nominee John McCain’s staff has announced that McCain helped invent the Blackberry, the famous email-checking phone.

Technically speaking, the statement refers to the telecommunications bills that McCain dealt with, which in turn allows the Blackberry to run. Not quite the inventor. At least, not how we commonly refer to as inventors.

But the way that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a McCain policy adviser worded it, it certainly sounds closer to an invention, as he waved his Blackberry around in front of reporters saying “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”

Then again, who knows, maybe he was one of the original Canadians who started Research In Motion, the company that “Officially” created the Blackberry. Pesky Canadians.

“Winning isn’t everything”

Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing. In fact, winning doesn’t matter at all.

What matters is CLAIMING the victory.

You don’t have to win, but if the people who matter see you as the winner, you’ve accomplished your task. That’s why cheating doesn’t pay, but creative rule-bending does. Let me give you an example.

We’re about halfway into the Olympics at the moment, and by the International Olympics Committee’s chart, China is leading with 27 gold medals. Coming second is the United States, with 17 gold medals, and finally Germany, with 9 gold medals. Does this mean that the Americans aren’t winning? Of course not.

(Taken from http://en.beijing2008.cn/)
“But wait,” you say, “Clearly the scoreboard shows CHN ranked as number 1, doesn’t that mean they’re winning?”

Absolutely not. Go over to ESPN’s website, or USA Today, or any other American media source, and you’ll soon see my point.

This is the ranking list on the New York Times website:

(Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/olympics2008/index.html)

See how suddenly, the tables are turned? Either side can effectively claim their own victory by changing how the system works. Depending on the media announcement you read, one or the other will come out Number 1.

Effectively, they claimed victory in the eyes of those who matter: their readers.

The problem with self-help advice.

We have great faith in authority. It doesn’t matter if it’s something Einstein once said about physics, we’ll apply it somehow to self-help as long as it sounds good.

Ultimately, self help advice comes from one of two sources: people who are already successful, or people who want to be successful. The people who are already successful give advice that are, from their vantage point, good.

But success comes from more than just the simple principles that they lived by, doesn’t it? It comes from IMMENSE amounts of dedication, hard work, blind faith, and luck. For every person that comes out on top saying “it’s because I believed in myself” or “I couldn’t have done it without passion” or “give 100% and never look back”, there’s a few thousand who believed in themselves immensely into a world of hurt.

Not all Entrepreneurs end up millionaires, and most of the “secrets to success” are really quite boring– be prepared to not have more than 4 hours of sleep a day, invest heavily in a ruthless lawyer, if your best friend business partner is unnecessary, cut him out. Pinch every possible penny, work twice as hard as your competition.

Oh, and pray. Because often the best that exists is best simply because they arrived at a better time than their competition, who works just as hard as they do (and believed in themselves just as much).

A lot of self-help advice end up being self-help advice not because they’re the best, but because they’re easier to sell. No one wants to read a book about how the protagonist worked against all odds but also had a trust fund parachute. We prefer John McCain as a war hero than a man who cheated on his wife with a richer (and better connected) woman, and we prefer Barack Obama as a visionary of the community over the guy who won against his opponents through legal technicalities.

A more honest self-help advice book would be filled with “Pursue your dreams– when your current plans aren’t working out”, “Be yourself, but learn to be a more presentable self”, “Give your best, and convince others to give their best before you sacrifice them”, and “Write your book of success BEFORE you succeed, it’s much easier to convince people to give you money that way”.

And that’s ultimately the goal of the UNimprovement blog– it’s here to help you realize that there’s nothing wrong with nice quotes to hang on your wall, but not only is it insufficient, it will sometimes guide you onto the wrong path. See self-help for what it really is: that friend of yours who’s always obsessed with sharing and positivity, but disappear when you need someone to help you move.

“You should only compete with yourself.”

This is an outrageous piece of advice reserved for only two types of people: The ones who have destroyed their competition to the point that they have ONLY themselves to compete with, and the ones who have so little ability that they simply cannot compete with anyone else.

Your personal best, unfortunately, really doesn?t mean all that much in the world. No one cares that you tried your best, they only care if you ARE the best. The only way to be the best? Beat the current champion to a bloody pulp and keep yourself at the top. Then you can compete with yourself all you want.

Can you imagine if Rocky only worked to beat his own personal best? Or if Olympic athletes worked hard to only beat their own records? Or if basketball teams only cared to have 1 point more than their previous games, even if the team they?re playing against has much more?
It?s just as ludicrous when you say it to yourself.

It?s a competitive world out there, you?re either playing for the gold or you?re not in the news. Here?s the hard truth: anyone reading this blog can come in last place, but there?s only one spot to stand on when they?re handing out the medals.

So what?s it going to be?

“What would you do if you couldn’t fail?”

Probably the same things you’re doing now.

Your first thought would probably be: “That’s just not true, I’ll go and try all the things that I didn’t dare before, I’ll go climb Everest and start my own corporation, and I’ll go do that as soon as tomorrow!”

And that’s the problem. You see, our fear of failure is not logical by any means. We’re not afraid to try because we’re afraid of fail, we’re afraid to try because… we’re afraid to try. Trying takes effort, and we don’t like effort. We like results. To be more specific, we like results without doing the work. Very rarely do we actually fail at something, because in order to truly fail and recognize defeat, we have to have done quite a bit of trying.

We rarely fail, most of the time we simply give up. We give up because we get bored, we get tired of trying, and we convince ourselves we just don’t care. Most of the time, we don’t try because we feel like it doesn’t matter enough.

So here’s a better question: “What would you do if it doesn’t matter if you fail OR succeed?”

This, in a way, frees you from the entire concept of failure. You would just act because you WANT to act, rather than act because you want to result. When we’re result-oriented, we lose sight of the purpose, and we’re no longer on our turf.

“Figure out what you want to do with your life and stick to it.”

This is the single worst piece of advice out there. Just horrible. Yet, I’ve heard it so many times under so many different type of guises. It’s most cleverly hidden in one of my most passionate enemies: “Passion”. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: “Find your passion, and live it”. This is the worst offender of self-help. You know why?

Because no one really knows what the fuck they want to do with their life. Not you, not me, not those Youtube kids. No one.

Let’s look at this interesting story: There was once a child, born in London. His parents were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, teaching him all about politics. He grew up with a love of politics as a result. At the young age of 12, he saw J.F.Kennedy at the Democratic Convention, and decided then to dedicate himself to understand and change the world through politics.

After getting a Bachelor’s of Arts in Political Science, he earned a Juris Doctorate degree from NorthWestern University. With his passion and drive, he showed exceptional talent by becoming a political campaign aide to Robert F. Kennedy, then joined the Cinnicinati law firm Frost & Jacobs.

At the young age of 26, he ran for Congress against Robert Clancy, but failed despite getting 45% of the votes. He showed tremendous initiative by attempting to ratify the 26th Amendment. A few years later, he was elected the city councilman of Cincinnati, and later ran for Governor of Ohio.

There’s no doubt that this is a man of great dedication and character, who clearly knew what he wanted, had great passion for his work of change and improvement, and a shining beacon for political success. Guessed who he is yet? Well, if you guessed Jerry Springer, you were absolutely right.

The defining symbol for passion and dedication in political change.

No one, at any given point of their life, know what they’re doing with their lives.

Top Lies of Hollywood. (Part 1)

Lie: The underdog always wins, because they’re special.

The untrained, unmotivated footballers from the wrong side of the train tracks have got a big game against one of the best teams from the state. The small-time dancer faces up against the snobbish rich grad from Julliard in the competition of a lifetime. A team of misfits join the academic decathlon to prove that against all odds, they can break the 22-year winning streak held by one of the best private schools in the country.

And naturally, they deserve to win. Because they have passion, desire, and personality.

The unfortunate thing about having this belief hammered into your head by just about every sports movie ever made is that the message is: being the best at something only requires you to LIKE it. Oh, and a quirky side character who thinks you’re, like, awesome.

The problem is, of course, that the snobbish kids who’s remained national champion 22 years running usually like what they do as well. They, too, have passion, desire, and personality (even though the movies don’t often show it). The difference is, they also have put in years of practice, hard work, and continuous effort. They too, were once the underdogs starting in a world they didn’t understand. Unlike the group of misfits who only took 2 weeks time to figure out what the hell they’re doing (about 2 minutes of montage), the favorites have been honing their skill for the last 12 weeks getting that last 5% perfect.

In the real world, when we compete against someone who has put in more time, has more talent, and have gotten all the necessary ingredients, we usually lose. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day that you WANTED it more than the other guys. You don’t necessarily deserve it.

If you worked hard at it, however, you might just get that gold. The girl, too.

“Be Yourself.”

Be yourself.

I?m sure you?ve heard this one being droned into your ear since you hit 3rd grade. ?Say no to drugs, don?t smoke, and be yourself.?

If you had any inklin of critical thought, chances are you were like me, quietly finding the whole concept ridiculous while nodding your head sweetly to your middle-aged sexually frustrated teacher.

Don?t get me wrong, drugs are horrible, smoking causes cancer, but to suggest that someone has the OPTION to be someone other than themselves is utter stupidity. The fact that it?s coming from someone who is putting on a condescending voice so the children can understand them better is pure hypocrisy. If any teacher acted like themselves, they would?ve been fired years ago.

And there?s the double standard that public schools set, isn?t it? It tells you to be honest and then punish those who are. If you were angry because little suzy took your crayons and yelled at her, you were sent to the corner. ?No, little Billy, when you get angry you?re supposed to repress it and ask for it back nicely.?

The underlining idea behind the ?be yourself? advice is simple, don?t be afraid to drop your act for social acceptance. But the idea behind it is extremely flawed, isn?t it? As adults, we live our lives in various phases. We don?t speak the same way to our boss as we do our buddies at the bar. We don?t act the same in front of our parents as we do in front of our kids. We don?t even dress the same way in front of priest as we do at a club.

If we were always ?ourselves?, we?d be outcasted by our society. And that is something all human beings desperately fear.

Just ask any 3rd grader.