Novocain & The "Success" Script

Success is a funny word. A dirty word. A cheap word slightly better than it’s bastard, saccharine cousin “Love.”  Most of us want to be successful yet few of us are. We pretend to know what success is, yet most of us don't really know. We try to tell people how to live “successfully” but we can’t do so ourselves. We try to pigeonhole success into something objective, 

while knowing inside that success is usually subjective. We blindly look for the answer, the silver bullet, that Eureka moment, but we don’t find it.  So, we unconsciously absorb the “success script”, a script not written by us, but imposed upon us; a script so well known, so familiar, so subtle, so pervasive, so consuming, so deadly that it kills, snuffing the life out of without you ever knowing it…

The Success Script:

1) Get good grades

2) Go to a great school

3) Get a good job (even if you hate it)

4) Buy a house (or live with your parents it’s your choice)

5) Travel

6) Possibly get married

7) Retire

8) Die

Following the “success” script is kind of like taking a daily shot of Novocain.  You feel no pain, no sensation, only blissful numbness. You go about drooling, walking in a hazed stupor, in a semi catatonic state, sort of high, sort of alive, mostly dull but anesthetized to the pain that you feel in your soul, that persistent, throbbing voice which wakes you in the night, and doesn’t let go until you take your next Novocain shot or have the courage to break the “success” script.  So you keep herding on, pretending not to see, pretending to be alive. You live each day as the last one, each month as the last one, each year as the last one...

Until it dawns upon you….(as you’re closing in on step 8)… that life could have been so much better if you had only broken the “success” script earlier...

Step 8 completed

But at least there was always Novocain….to dull you while you were still alive…