The Secret of Success Revealed

A great many moons ago, when I left school at the age of fifteen, I was told that to get on in life, I had to get a trade. So my first job was apprentice motor mechanic. I loved cars anyway, so it was a slam dunk of a choice.

Over the following four years, the fun wore off due to long hours, dirty heavy work and piss-poor pay. So I left and ended up in a wide variety of dead-end jobs. Barman, taxi driver, factory hand.....you name it I did it. And I have to say I felt like I was going nowhere, which I was.

Then I was told that to really get on I needed a good qualification. So, I started to do evening classes, to try to get enough good qualifications to do a degree. It took me three years of after-work, evening classes, until finally I managed to get into university.

Three years later I graduated with an excellent degree and immediately got a nice clean office job as a copywriter in a big advertising agency, earning quite a tidy sum. This is the life I thought, and it was, until it wasn't. The UK went into a big economic recession and it wiped out not just my job, but my profession too. Back to square one.

I was told I would have to retrain. So, I went back to university for two more years to become a professional teacher. I got a good full-time job at some college on termly contracts. That was fine by me.

Then the European Union, of which the UK used to be a member (until Brexit) made a ruling that workers in all member countries who were on temporary contracts, must be entitled to paid sick leave and holidays. Oh dear, this well-intentioned legislation cost me my job and again my career.

The bean counters at my college, like all others, decided that they could not afford to comply with the new law. And so every temp lost his or her job. I stood on yet another snake in this game of snakes and ladders.

My next job was pizza delivery boy using my own car. This was followed by a career in selling advertising and another in car sales. Then I made a dick move and got re-married, and had a baby with, a stark raving mad, toxic narcissist.

We moved to her home city in the south of Spain. There she fearlessly abused me, maliciously ruined two very good businesses (my own very successful language academy and a piano bar) stole my new car and cost me a brand-new luxury apartment. In all, she cost me about a quarter of million euros. To cap it all she skipped the country with my son and I have not seen nor heard from them since 2014.

Once again out of work, I became a professional musician, wannabe music producer and singer-songwriter. In truth, I earned my living mostly by busking on restaurant patios.

In time, I met my lovely third, and present, wife and moved to live in Japan. I am now retired and fill my days writing on Medium and Vocal Media. Thank the lord, my wife has a very good professional career in the Japanese health service. As for me, I am reduced to a small UK pension for pocket money. It certainly is not enough to live on, not even to get by on.

And often I sit on my porch on a stool and wonder, where on earth did I go wrong? Eventually, I came up with the answer. I listened to too many people telling me what I had to do.

To hell with a trade, a qualification, a profession, a career. That was all to tell this cannon fodder, that I am, what my role in a working life was. More to the point, I have now realised, I fear too late, the secret of real success.

All I had to do was become a thick-as-pig-shit weird bastard. It's a piece of piss. All you have to do is act weird, with confidence mind, and try not to break any laws to do with obscenities, underage sex or illicit drugs. The supporting evidence for this Eureka discovery? Switch on the TV or read the newspapers and magazines to see what passes for icons of popular culture and celebrity. Stinking rich and totally bloody useless.

And, if you fail to fake it until you make it, try to find a millionaire female (or otherwise, to be politically correct) to fall in love with. Errrr.....where's Whitney? Oh shit, she kicked the bucket years ago.

With one final throw of the dice, I could take up something I do know an awful lot about, from bitter personal experience. Yes, you've guessed it...

Make your calling in life to become a toxic narcissist and have a lot of fun fleecing everybody you manage to charm with that malicious silver tongue of yours. From what I have experienced, you can have an enormous amount of fun making everybody else as miserable as freekin sin.

Oh well, back to the paltry pension and writing on Vocal Media for chicken feed.