“If you fail to prepare, you must prepare to fail.”

Other than being a neat little phrase, this actually applies to many areas in life. While a lot of people get away in life by ‘winging it’, we’re often told that it’s much better to prepare for things in order to give us the best chance. At the end of the day, this kind of thing is something that individuals must make up their own minds about; nobody has the right to tell you how to live your life, or what the boundaries of your life should be, might I add. 

I’m the kind of person who leans toward the side of ‘winging’. Having said that, I do believe that in certain cases preparation is everything, but in the majority of tests and tribulations that we will encounter in everyday life isn’t something you can plan for. After all, life isn’t an exam: you can’t revise for it. It’s all to do with dealing with pressure, and I tend to do things better when I’m driven by pressure. I get extremely irritated when people point out my faults, or tell me how I should do things, and this tends to translate itself into a passive anger, which gives me the motivation and passion to do things well. 

Fear of failure is something that everybody has; nobody likes to fail. Why is failure so feared? Well, humiliation is certainly a part of it, but failure makes you stronger. If you are willing to learn from your mistakes, then failure can be a good thing. 

This brings me back to the title of the post; true, it may be better off safe than sorry, but what I’m saying is that being sorry for something brings you back round to the very start of the argument. If you don’t prepare, you will fail, but in my view lack of preparation and subsequent failure (in any aspect of life) counts as preparation. 

Time for another one of my emo-esque posts. I came across a rather funny line recently, from a demotivational poster:

“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a Ferrari, and when have you ever seen an unhappy Ferrari driver?”

While this is obviously intended as a joke and cannot stand as an important philosophical or moral belief, I saw something very interesting in it. Sure, money can’t buy happiness, but it most certainly can buy you temporary happiness. Humans are always looking for something better than they already have; it’s part of our instincts, and those of us who are most successful are always pushing higher and higher to get, or be, the best. 

So what happens when you’ve reached the top? Well, I’d like to quote Lil’ Wayne:

“You know you at the top when only Heaven’s right above it…”

What he’s essentially saying is that when you’re at the top, the only thing above you is Heaven. Later on in the song, Wayne says that he’s been “…fly for so long I(he) fell asleep on the fuckin’ plane”. The obliviousness that people with money have toward the basic requirements of being a human being gives them a bubble of perceived happiness. When you believe money makes your world revolve, you get a huge shock when you return to reality. 

I recently read a similar post to this by a friend, and felt inspired to let off a bit of steam, so to speak. I’m happy to admit that I am an unabashed optimist; no matter how bad something or a situation is, I always see the good that often is not at the end of the tunnel. The trouble with this view is that it only tends to keep oneself happy through the next 24 hours, and in some ways you could call this denial. I can always see at least one good point about a situation and use this to my advantage. That’s the main problem with this mindset I have; I constantly have to find new ways to boost my optimism and motivation, which includes twisting the truth. Many of my friends will disagree with this but I am in fact a very good liar, lol; when things go badly I tend to keep myself sane to some extent by convincing myself and others that things are nowhere near as bad as they really are. To most people, this is an unhealthy mindset, however it actually works for me. Covering up the real truth is something I’m very good at, and however unattractive this trait may be, I’m good at it and I count it as a talent (insert quip about me being an asshole here, I don’t care what you think). 

I wish I could have started out on the Internet with an entirely concealed identity, that way I could say so much more about myself without giving away information that I don’t wish to be disclosed, which is why the next part will be suitably ambiguous. I believe that to fully assess a human being (as inhumane as that is) one needs to take into account and combine every aspect of that person, whether good or bad, and provide a balanced and fair-minded judgement. Judging me on the basis that you have spoken to me only three times in the space of the three weeks I’ve been working with you and the fact you don’t know me at all is, quite frankly, fucking insulting. I’m one of those people who you need to get to know in order to find out what I’m really like, so I know instantly when people judge me having not known me. 

There are only a select few people in my life who I could call a true friend, and there are a lot of people who like to entertain the fact that they are my friend when in fact they don’t know the first thing about me. I’m a cold-hearted bastard, you may think, but I’m actually much more forgiving and (dare I say it) loving than I make out to be; being taken advantage of and lied to and persecuted by a group of people I now call my friends takes a big piece of forgiveness, huh? I thought so.

In short, this post is not designed as a cold-hearted, ambiguous attack on those individuals who are the reason I’m writing this, take from it what you want, and if you think you know to whom or what I am referring directly then it’s likely you are wrong. The vast majority of people who know me via the Internet think I have a pretty perfect life from the seemingly constant happiness I ‘radiate’, this post is to tell you that it isn’t all like that, and not to judge me by my cover; too many people have done this as of late, and it hurts. I’m sorry you had to read this, and I’m sorry I can’t be my usual happy self. Wish me luck. 

Sidebar: The weather has been pretty cold recently; typing this was a minefield of spelling errors, lol.