Danny was sure he’d finally found the path to success. After all, if you believed the ads, thousands before him had trod the same road and made millions, why shouldn’t he?

So, he signed on, paid hundreds of dollars, and waited for his personal “Path to Life Success” program to arrive in the mail.

Two CD’s. that was it. Not impressive he thought, but again, maybe this success thing wasn’t that complicated, reminded of the thousands who’d already triumphed.

He started in, breezed through the CD’s in short order, wondering whose idea it was to have a sultry female voice do the narration. But, then there came an equally distracting male voice that was beyond hyper. What kind of drugs were these two on?

Lesson One” Know yourself.

Okay, a sound idea in principle, but not something that was going to jump out of a bathroom mirror at you. Danny did the work on personal budgeting, then made a list of his close friends. Both exercises took little time as, after paying for the “Personal path to Life Success” his bank balance was in the low three digits. This dispiriting reality matched with his friends list, which came to five, and he probably shouldn’t have counted the mailman.

Lesson 2-Set goals

Danny liked setting goals. He did it every New Year. Setting goals was never a problem. Doing the work to make them happen was. So, he wrote them down again, get out of debt, lose weight and get in shape, learn new skills that would get him a better job than elementary school janitor. he put in a few things that he never believed would happen, find a girlfriend who actually liked him, get a new car that wasn’t twenty years old, and go on a Hawaiian vacation

Lesson 3-do the work

Danny knew the course, his path to life success, would finally come down to this. the problem was those two animated cheerleaders on the CD’s were not living with him. They weren’t there to remind him that watching Monday Night Football instead of putting together his submission to community college wouldn’t pay the same dividends. His four actual “friends’ weren’t any help either. Ben, the barman at the local sports pub, could only occasionally emit more than one syllable. tony, the janitor he worked with, only spoke Spanish. And Mr. and Mrs. McCarty, the old couple next door, well, between his dementia and her fondness for daytime soaps, not much help coming from that direction.

Lesson 4-forget the hocus-pocus

After the third time listening to his “Personal Path to Life Success” CD’s, Danny slowly set them on the table and shook his head. No, he wasn’t really an idiot, he just acted like one most of the time. Fortunately, his “Personal Path to Life Success” program had been bought at a 50% early bird discount. Now, the money he’d saved would pay for his first semester at community college night school.


Moral-

get organized
be disciplined
keep treading on

this is how you get things done

grind on
don’t stop
don’t pause for breath
for failure would be certain death

it takes hard work and lots of sweat
to reach the goals that we have set

but let’s skip all the hocus pocus
because you, too, may hav noticed

that when the race is finally run

this kind of stuff just isn’t fun


tio stib