A New Mental Manifesto

I used to be rather unhappy with myself. I didn't like the way I looked, dressed, talked, acted around people. The only thing I really did, that I thought I did well, was play video games. Maybe some basketball, but in any sort of social situation I was a horrible klutz. For one thing I stuttered. Like a madman. Maybe a bad tape deck. I was also chubbier than I liked, and for the longest time I had no idea where all the cool kids bought their clothes.

I prayed a lot more back then. One of my prayers was, see, I asked God to make me cool. Popular. I wanted to be loved, just like everyone else, but I believe this desire screams a little louder in me than in others. I had good parents, but they were never too affectionate or nothing. And I've never really had a girlfriend. John Mayer says it pretty well: "Just wanna be liked. Just wanna be funny."

The beauty of it all, though, now that I'm here, is this: The genuine dissatisfaction with myself really spurned me to greater heights. I became the person I set my sights on. I really did. I got to be pretty happy with the person I had become. I'm not sure if God worked this out for me or what, but I guess I sorta believe it. Anyway, I started getting all complacent-like, see, and that's the dangerous part. I feel like I havn't really grown ever since I started feeling this way.

So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go back and take my old mindset, with some caveats. The mindset is that I'm gonna be dissatisfied with stuff about me. That won't be too hard, I don't think I'll have to dig too deep for that. The caveat, though, is to take some sort of real, progressive action to fix it. See, I think the stuff I fixed before was some real silly stuff that you just kind of get rid of by growing older. This new stuff though, it's pretty persistent. So the caveat is, I'm gonna force some growth on me.

You see, I believe that the greats in this world, most of them, didn't start off so hot. They were slobs and losers, kind of like me, maybe even worse off, some of them. But what made them great, was they were all, at one time or another, in a position where they either had to do something, or die. Not necessarily die in terms of really dying, you know, but just die in terms of not surviving.

Here's what I mean. A few weeks ago, we interviewed this film director. His name isn't important, but he isn't even 40 years old yet, and his movies have bought in one and a half billion dollars. That's huge. Anyway, this guy he said that if he hadn't gotten into NYU and gotten his start there, he probably would have just sat on his mother's couch all day and been a nobody. A forty-year-old nobody. So that's kind of how I feel about success. You find yourself in a position where you can either do it, or not, and the complications for 'not' mean something that would be certain death.

How that relates to me, is see, I plan to put myself in a spot where I'm either gonna grow the way I want to, or I'm not gonna get any further. I have a half-baked plan for how to do this, that might take about three or four months. I havn't figured out all of it though, so you might have to wait for the next entry to hear about it. It'll be pretty extraordinary, though, but I might have to not tell my parents about it. They'll probably freak out.