Return of the Life-Hack Guru

It's September, we're heading into autumn, and look who's just turned up: it's our old friend the peripatetic Life-Hack Guru. We haven't seen him since 2014! He gets around: on an eleven-year cycle like the sun, it seems. So lay some of that hard-won wisdom on us, coach!

[The Life-Hack Guru clears his throat, somewhat ostentatiously, spits, and speaks]

OK, listen closely now, I'll only be saying this once, unless there are repeat fees.

So people often say to me, how is it that someone as plebeian, short, and plug-ugly as yourself has made it into a position of such eminence and enlightenment that you feel able to hand out advice to the likes of me, whose many advantages in life have, admittedly, taken me nowhere much? Please explain your secret of happiness and success, Life-Hack Guru!

Hmm, happiness and success... Tricky. Well, if I do have a secret, a large part of it is actually a list. Not one made by me, but some self-help bullet-points I found in a magazine that someone had left on the seat of a train one afternoon long ago in the past, back where all the best secrets are hidden. Although, in fact, my actual secret is that I found that I could disagree so violently with every item in this pathetic checklist of sententious twaddle that my philosophy of life evolved in opposition to it. That's proper dialectics, that is: accept no substitute.

So you might say I am here to deliver a kick in the listicles. As Bill Blake said to me one night: The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. At least, that's what I thought he said. It was a very noisy tavern.

Anyway, here we go: taking a leaf out of Bill's book, here is my new improved angelical-diabolical PowerPoint presentation. Lights down and first slide, please:

Angelic Proposition 1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. Avoid anyone who makes you unhappy, wastes your time, or holds you back. People who want to drag you down to their level are not your friends.

Demonic Refutation: Seek out the "wrong" people! They will enrich your life, and at the very least make you look good. Who needs dull friends?
 
AP 2. Stop lying to yourself. There's no need to pretend everything is OK if it isn’t. It's pointless to pursue goals you don't believe in, only to blame someone else for your subsequent failure.

DR: Self-deception is the royal road to the top. Who cares to the top of what or where? You can always pretend you meant to go there, should you ever get there. If not, then you will know who to blame!

AP 3. Don't ignore your own needs. In particular, don't pretend to be, or try to become someone you’re not, just to please someone else, or just to be liked.

DR: Isn't this just AP 2 worded differently? Do I really need to spell this out? Do you honestly think the secret of success in any field is "just be yourself"? You will be entitled to add some ridiculously self-centred "needs" in a rider to your contract when you reach the top (apparently Paul McCartney won't sit on leather seats), but meantime there are people to schmooze, gatekeepers to bribe, false friends to cultivate. For seriously ambitious wannabes "fake it to make it" is a profound teaching.

AP 4. Don't cling on to the past. In particular, stop beating yourself up over old mistakes. Get over it.

DR: Show me a successful person who does not obsess over their past mistakes, and I'll show you a complacent idiot with a trust fund. We learn from and are fuelled by shame and humiliation; don't jettison your personal rocket fuel. Grudges burn particularly well, too. Revenge is a dish best served hot, steaming, and from a great height.

AP 5. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Avoid the urge to perfection. "The best is the enemy of the good".

DR: Look no further for an explanation of the wave of mediocrity that has overwhelmed us. "Good enough" is not good enough. Sure, make mistakes, but don't let them get into the final draft. May all your enemies and rivals be mediocrities content with "good enough"!

AP 6. Stop trying to buy happiness. The best things in life cannot be bought with money. Try investing some time instead.

DR: Oh, please... Invest as much time as you like in your Skoda, it will still be a Skoda. Try investing in a high-risk portfolio of stocks and shares instead. See the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25: 14-30). It seems Jesus was pretty hard-nosed, when it came to the up-side of usury.

AP 7. Take care of the pennies. Notice and value the constant flow of small, ordinary things, otherwise one day you will realise – too late! – that that was all there was ever going to be.

DR: See AP 6. Nobody ever became rich, actually or metaphorically, by penny-pinching. Think big, or you will shrink to fit. The God of Small Things is a liar and a cheat, who will get you high and then steal your wallet while you gawp at the pattern in the carpet.

AP 8. Avoid self pity and complaint. It's tough all over. Nobody wants to know how hard it was for you to do what you did, especially if moaning about it has become your substitute for doing it.

DR: A good moan in bad company (see AP 1) is one of life's great pleasures. Why deny yourself?

AP 9. If at first you don't succeed, try doing it differently, but only slightly differently. To persist in a course of action hoping for a different outcome is not the definition of neurosis, it is the definition of persistence.

DR: Yet another way to bury us in unwanted gifts from untalented people. Give it a couple of radically different approaches, then give it up and try something else. Or better still, get back in the audience. Trust John Keats: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all". 

AP 10. Ambition and competitiveness are easily confused. Jealousy of the achievements of others and holding grudges are poisons: hate, anger and jealousy will hurt you, not their object. True ambition is generous to the aspirations of others.

DR: A little poison can be highly stimulating. "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail". See AP 4. Ambition without sharp elbows is like a car without wheels: it's going nowhere.

OK, Lights up, please. No questions, I'm afraid. Confuse Us he say, "I instruct only the passionate. I enlighten only the fervent. If a student cannot return with the other three corners of the square after I have shown them the first one, I will not repeat the lesson." Right on: plus one here. Now, any chance of that decaf coffee with oat milk in a proper china mug, as per my rider?

[The Life-Hack Guru lapses into meditative silence]

IDIOTIC HAT: Um, not a question, more a prompt: perhaps you could expand a little on a couple of the slides? It's all been a bit epigrammatic, not to say gnomic...

LIFE-HACK GURU: Hmm, OK, just one. Let's take Number 5, "the best is the enemy of the good". Now, as you know, I follow trends in kitchen design very closely.

IH: I didn't know that!

LHG: Well, now you do. Kitchen fittings are an excellent gauge of society's direction. I surely can't be the only one to have lost my shit over some baffling touch-controlled convection hob: why are there no fucking knobs on this thing?? Or to have wondered why a permanently-installed "island" with no knee space is preferable to a moveable "table"? You know that feeling that design has got the upper hand over function? That all appliances aspire to the condition of a smartphone? There's the modern world for you, served up on a slate when you would have preferred a plate.

IH: Interesting!

LHG: I don't do dull, son. Anyway, imagine you are a kitchen installer: it's easy if you try. There are thousands of them out there, mostly doing a perfectly decent, good-enough job. Your tops are level, the units stay on the wall, the heights are right for standard appliances, the plumbing works, and so on. It's a competitive business, so pricing the job is critical, which means getting the balance of labour, materials, and time spent just right. But low margins mean a jobbing fitter needs a full calendar of work, so word of mouth and online reviews are useful, but not essential if they can get a foot in the door of one of the big retailers. Very much a case of the best being the enemy of the good. Why pay more?

IH: I don't see where this is going?

LHG: Patience, young man, patience. Now, most people are happy with ready-made, standard-size MDF fittings with veneers or laminates that make them look like wood or marble, say. They're good enough! But some people want the real thing: your solid wood, yer actual marble. For these you need real carpentry skills, not just a few power tools, especially if the job has to be fitted into the irregular, hobbit-like kitchen space of some bijou listed cottage. We're talking lots of time, hard-won expertise, carefully-sourced and expensive materials: in other words, nothing but the best! Jobs like that will be fewer, your highly-skilled workforce will expect better pay, and you'll probably have a workshop to maintain, too, not just a van, so you'll be charging more. A lot more. Worse, you'll be dealing with the sort of people who can afford to be choosy. They will demand perfection and you will be expected to deliver it. Why pay less?

IH: So the rich get better stuff than the rest of us. Same as it ever was. And your point is?

LHG: Look, can you cook and store all your stuff in your good-enough MDF kitchen? Of course you can. Does food taste better prepared on Carrara marble surfaces and served on ludicrously expensive designer tableware? Of course it doesn't. So why does anyone bother with the best? Precisely because it's the enemy of the good! The wealthy must be seen to be wealthy; above all, to each other. See Veblen goods, see handbags that cost thousands. I mean, would you even know a Hermès Birkin bag if one happened to fall on you out of the overhead locker? Of course you wouldn't, you always travel economy!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it – and I'm sorry if this comes across as the well-worn life-hack cliché that it probably is – is to mix your personal brew of good-enough and the very best to your own satisfaction: you  know, cut your coat according to your cloth, light yourself a candle, don't wear socks and sandals, no one I think is in my tree, um... Dammit, I've confused meself now... It's all good, is what I'm saying. There's truth and bullshit in equal measure on either side of that angelical-diabolical ding-dong. Get the balance right – trust me, it ain't easy – and you might even earn yourself one of my gold Life-Hack Guru stickers! I'm told the ones that say "My ambition was hacked to pieces!" go for a fair bit on eBay.

IH: OK, Mr. Natural, thanks for that – I think. I'm pretty sure we can all find a takeaway message in there somewhere! So, see you in another eleven years, maybe, if you're passing this way? Here's your coffee; careful, it's hot. And less of the "young man", if you don't mind: I'm seventy-one and a half!

LHG: Exactly. And your point is?