Success: It's just..... so ambiguous.

But what's even more ambiguous, is being unsuccessful. This interpretation that others have on you and how they stack your achievements.

Zero: success found

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” The age old question asked to children as an exercise of testing the brains forward thinking ability.** The question doesn’t matter. The answers don’t matter.** As a child my response was always a police man. I wanted to run around with a gun and put the bad guys behind bars. Images of Starsky and Hutch, sliding across the hood of a car to catch the perp were what I prepped for as a kid running around the house in camouflage pants and a walkie talky as if preparing for the draft. Half of everyone decided they’d be policemen, astronauts, doctors…. but who actually becomes what they thought was a good idea 20 years earlier.

Living in todays world kids don’t ride bicycles anymore to friends houses and ring Johnny Appleseed’s doorbell to see if they can come out to play. Hell, parents don’t even name their kids Johnny Appleseed anymore. We don’t mow our own lawns anymore, clean our own houses, and often enough don’t cook our own food. The thoughts and values of what our country was founded on in the then became — unsuccessful.

Those plans we had of self fulfilling occupations when we knew nothing of the world or paying bills went right out the window when our parents drilled us into the idea of college necessities and building a career. Just because they were happy to push papers around a desk all day for some jerk-off boss that only got where he was because he played hierarchy politics — doesn’t mean that we’d be happy doing it as well. You can take the degree back, we want a refund.

Being spoon-fed visions of smiling couples dancing, men shaving in luxurious bathrooms, athletes pulling up in Mercedes trucks driven by drivers — we’ve applied barn doors to our sights of reality and **what we interpret success to be. **Instagram and Facebook have become our worst nightmares in forward progress and thought. We live life as cattle being ushered into the barn doors through internet cookies and mass media’s funneling techniques— and success is all we see and know.

You only absorb what you’ve been exposed to and if all we see day in and day out is commercials of families on yachts, vacations on islands, or images of diamond rings… how will we ever become successful enough to be the person in these ads. I’ve worked hard as shit through my life and my net worth is still -$40k. Yes, that’s a fucking negative sign. I’m in debt from school. My bank account is empty. And I have a couple of shares of stock, some digital currencies, and a ROTH IRA account that will pay a months rent when I retire. You’re definitely more successful than I am — I’m pretty sure of it.

The mental measuring tape is real. Stacking where we ourselves stand in a world of being shown what we should be, or where we should be, happens to the vast majority of us. If Ted has an extremely gorgeous wife, a sleek new red convertible, and going on vacations every two weeks then what are we doing wrong? We’re constantly exposed to over 1,000 adverts per day in various forms. Some we actually see — and some whiz right over our head. It’s the ones we pay attention to though that are selling — people. “Everyday, normal, people”.

We’re hardwired to compare. Everything. We’re comparing prices at the grocery store to find which is the best value or cheaper price. We compare distance in the way of calculating how much time is left before we reach the destination. And lastly, we compare where** other people** stand in their lives as measures of our own success.

The advertisements we see are usually produced perfectly, as a graphic designer I know. The treatment over the photos is soft and angelic with hues of yellow and orange, creating this artificial sun-flare… and all the while you’re sitting there subconsciously stimulated into thinking, “Wow, the guy in this photo twirling around in this girls long flowy dress in the grass has such a better life than I do”. And as you say to yourself — that’s not me or how I think… it is. Your subconscious takes into account a measure of your success versus the success perceived through the photo you’ve just briefly analyzed.

Our entire lives growing up we’ve heard, “What do you want to be when you grow up —  a garbage man?”

The “find success” mentality torch has been engraved into our way of thought from such a young age we’ve developed Success-Stockholm-Syndrome from our parents. The most insane part of that question though is the way the diction is applied. As if it was said with an elongated pinky out while having conversations about the Royal Wedding over tea and crumpets. But to be frank the answer is, “YES! I want to be a fucking garbage man because they have great benefits and are often making over $100,000 a year! They get out of work early and have the rest of the day to do whatever and get to take vacations! Paid fucking vacations!”

I’ve spent my entire life going left when everyone seems to gravitate towards the shiny objects. You thought I was going to end that sentence with go right, didn’t you? But that right there is a prime example of the mentality that’s hardwired to me. The search for success has been at the forefront of my mission-space since I dropped out of my second high-school (it was actually a barbwired prison of sorts) and created this mission for myself to prove people wrong. To prove that we don’t need the same traditional route of schooling to find success. To prove that people shouldn’t judge my book by my kick ass graphic design talents that made it. To prove that success is obtainable through doing things differently. So here we are… Writing a book about success.

The truth is though, I’m unsuccessful. Really fucking unsuccessful. This is the story of the measuring tape of superficiality.