oldpoxbox.com

STUFF TO BUY:

GOOD vs EVIL poster

Shirts!

Pixel Posters 4 pack

The Alphabet of Manliness

FRIENDS:

You're gonna fail

by:Pox

2011/04/13

So I've been listening to audiobooks recently and I've noticed that the most popular ones usually fall under two categories:

- How to meet a woman and put your penis in her ASAP
- How to be the most successful person ever at everything and achieve all your dreams while crushing everyone else (ethically).

I want to talk about the second thing... The books in that section further divide into 2 sub-categories:

-Things anyone can do
-Things not everyone should do

The first category is for things about self-improvement. Yeah, any dumbass can lose weight, learn how to play the guitar moderately well or start conversations with strangers. Sure. Go nuts. These are books like:

The main focus of just about all of these is "Get off your ass and go talk to people / do things". Yep, there's the secret to life. Go do things. If you're waiting for that trick on how to do things, stop, because it doesn't exist. Eventually you have to just take a chance or get off your ass and accomplish something, no matter how impossibly lazy your genes are.
These books are also pretty damn slim on content and can usually be summarized in a couple lines. Thank God for audiobooks or else this is a serious waste of time.
The second category of books though, is books like these:

This is the "If everyone did this, we'd be fucked" category. They mainly teach you how to be a lazy dick who makes everyone else work for your benefit so you can go roam the world in your fancy car. These are the books that are telling you that everyone is basically a sucker who's too dumb to succeed. Of course what we forget is that it's only the people WHO MAKE IT who write the books. Of course every damn musician who writes a book will tell you to follow your dreams, because no one's giving book deals to the 45 year old Starbucks manager who dropped out of school to start a shitty band that went nowhere in the 80s.

Not everyone can do a 4 hour work week. If every doctor decided they'd work 4 hours a week, we'd pretty much be dead. If inventors, scientists, engineers, architects... shit..pretty much everyone who makes anything.. did that, nothing would get done. No one would have a fancy car or a private jet. By the very nature of the world, WE CAN'T ALL BE RICH. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. EVER.

So these books rely on your believing there's some secret method whereby YOU can trick everyone else into giving up their money! Yes, there is SOMETHING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO MAKE 80K A WEEK! And of course the first step is to BUY THE BOOK.

And on top of that, just about every trick to make money is about investing in risky bullshit. Kiyosake and Trump used to be really into real estate, except it CRASHED HARD. They made their money because they got lucky and their success lead thousands if not millions of people to blow up a giant real estate bubble that exploded in their face and resulted in them being a lot poorer. As far as I know, the "How to lose 20k in one year of bad investments" book hasn't hit the store shelves just yet.

Chances are, you're not going to be rich no matter what you do. By the very nature of money and the economy, you can't get richer without someone else getting poorer. There's only a set amount of money around and if you have 1000 more this week it means the rest of people have 1000 less. The only real way to make money without taking from others is to produce something and none of these jackasses give you any tips on that. ALl their books are about money-shuffling. Buy something and then sell it for more later. That's the big secret apparently. Don't make anything, just buy something from someone and find someone else who'll pay more and pretend like you're providing a service.

BAH. Now I'll go read the books about how to meet loose women in bars...

Follow My Stuff ( cause it's rad, and you are rad, therefore must do this):