My Homework from 'A Brief Guide to World Domination'

Today I am in Adelaide, and like most days in Adelaide, I am spending this one at my parents' house doing nothing much and essentially waiting for something to happen. Is this what I want for myself? To wait? I don't know, that wasn't a rhetorical question.

Who do I want to be? I read something a while ago called 'A Brief Guide to World Domination' by some guy whatever who cares, which asked two questions that it said should be at the core of everything we do:

1. “What do you really want to get out of life?”
   
2. “What can you offer the world that no one else can?”
   

Tough stough... (just a little spelling joke there, before I start getting serious)

Okay, so number one. What do “I” want to get... out of... life... what do I want to get out of life? No holding back. Okay, what I want to get out of life, I think is... everything. No. Okay. I want to get everything that I want. I want to be able to have everything that I want at any given moment accessible to me as soon as possible. But what do I want? I think I want people to pay attention to, and like me. Pretty shallow huh...

I'm sure I can do better than that – the danger here though is trying to dress that fairly base desire just laid down there in careful rationalizations that make them look more altruistic... well I want the people that I care about to be happy. That makes me happy. But then, I do want their happiness to somehow involve me, like maybe I want people to be happy, BECAUSE of me. I want to make people happy. Yes. I don't want people to just be happy at random, I want to be responsible for peoples' happinesses – as many and as great as possible. That's right. Me! Taco!

That sounds realistically selfish while still being acceptable, doesn't it? The oft-quoted eulogism, “all he wanted to do was make people happy”, I feel can be translated to this selfish desire.

1. “What do you really want to get out of life?”
   “Well, Mr So-And-So Psychiatrist, I would like to be, through my own actions, personally responsible for as many peoples' happiness as possible. And it'd be nice if they knew about it too.”
   

Now what can I offer the world that no one else can? Fuck me, really? Ugh... okay... my blood? Fingerprints? This word - “Quertykoacquatlophyx”... ?

Stop being an idiot, idiot.

I honestly have no idea... okay, so currently, what I want to do with my life in the long term is I want to be a stand-up comedian. I guess that implies that I believe I have an unique point of view that no one else can offer the world. That doesn't really feel accurate though. Louis CK – arguably the best (Most original? Funniest? Most successful?) comedian in the world right now has quite a few AMAZING jokes about how if you're in your early twenties you are the most worthless kind of person and have nothing to offer the world. (“If you're twenty... okay... fine... we'll see.”) As degrading as that sounds, I can't help it from sounding pretty reasonable too. I have potential, but that's it.

But is that it? Potential? Eugh... Is the answer to question two that I have an unique potential, different from that of anyone else? I am now, being as I am at my wit's end with this question, going to attempt to unashamedly list what I perceive to be my positive attributes that I might better understand the nature of this disgusting 'potential' that is apparently so important to my happiness:

• I am good at communicating my thoughts
  
• I am driven and work hard
  
• I am generally likeable (queue sarcastic jeering)
  
• I am funny when given the opportunity ie. When I am sufficiently comfortable in a social situation
  
• I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic, and making lists
  

That's all, I think. I don't actually have any real tangible skills that have been cultivated or worked on, these are pretty much all either basic character traits, or things that I have developed over years interacting with people socially. But I guess the skill that I'm cultivating right now is stand-up comedy, which, for the uninitiated, is definitely a skill make no mistake.

So I guess that's it:

2. “What can you offer the world that no one else can?”
   “My potential, apparently, whatever that is.”
   

What is probably the most damning detail here though is that even after being so obviously affected by the two questions posed by 'A Brief Guide to World Domination', I couldn't be bothered remembering, or even looking up, the guy's name who wrote it to put in my blog. God damn it. I guess I'll have to reconcile myself with the fact that as endeavouring to bring happiness and fulfilment into other peoples' lives is an anonymous and largely thankless endeavour. But then WHERE DOES MY SELFISH PART GET TO COME IN??!

I guess, really, I only wanted to be famous.

Peace, Taco.


[if anyone wants to read the actual thing I'm referencing here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/40787/worlddomination.pdf]