10 Steps to Not Being Pathetic

The road is long but it's better than sitting at home & rotting.

Accept that you’ll never be “one of the good ones.”

If you’re a designated scapegoat, everything about you is perceived to be inferior automatically. Your accomplishments are considered flukes. Your value is contingent on remaining compliant, and you disgust the people you’re groveling to. You will never be even halfway embraced; you will be begrudgingly tolerated in the best case-scenario.

SO:

STEP 1: Stop playing games you aren’t allowed to win.
STEP 2: Engage with people who see you as an entire human being to be valued and not a thing to be used.
STEP 3: Let yourself be great without permission of the pathetically insecure and their precarious and unfair positions of authority.

Accept that your ignorance is a choice, not a fate.

It’s called a library. Go inside one. Touch some dead trees. There’s no grand conspiracy to keep your brain smooth that cannot be overcome with Gutenberg’s technology. Don’t brag that you don’t know things. That’s pathetic, and you earn no sympathy for it. There’s nothing noble about a persistent refusal to even attempt to understand the world around you.

SO:

STEP 4: Decide to become an expert in a topic (don’t worry, this will not turn you gay if you are not already).
STEP 5: Absorb as much information on the topic as you can.
STEP 6: Keep metabolizing information into leverageable knowledge.
STEP 7: Let your knowledge become identity-defining expertise.

If you want somebody to fall head over heels for you, you have to give them something to trip over.

Bitter, stinky, sweaty, and lumpy are only selling points for cheese. You cannot demand anyone else be the complete package when you are an empty, grimy shell. If you want to improve your prospects, improve yourself. Deep, hard, honest, consistent, and introspective work. Become someone you can respect instead of resent.

SO:

STEP 8: Bond with others who value both you as a human and you as an expert in your field.
Step 9: Do things via your social and neural networks that make lives (including your own) less painful and more beautiful.
Step 10: Teach some kids what you know (they need not be entirely yours—no child ever is).