Advice

There are a lot of successful, famous people who like to give advice on how to live your life and be successful and rich and happy like them. As if being successful and rich wasn’t enough in itself they also have to be smug and condescending. The advice is greeting card philosophical bullshit like don’t give up, have fun, and do something you love. The same type of advice offered in a hundred self-help books – the power of positive thinking and other such horse shit. I would say that for 99% of people on planet Earth this is all-but impossible and in fact only serves to perpetuate the rich-poor gap. The global media machine is constantly telling us how terrible our lives are and how miserable we should be based on the fact that we don’t have six or eight figure salaries or our own Caribbean islands. How do we even have the gall to get up in the morning and face the world?

This type of advice is all shit as I can testify. Do something you love. Be yourself. Don’t give up. So I love writing (or I thought I did) and became a self-published author. In fact I thought I was being published with the help of the British Arts Council but it boiled down to being self-published as a POD author with the dreadful carrot-and-stick masochistic machine that was Youwriteon.com and then became NewGenerationPublishing (whose first author killed himself, I think, perhaps not surprisingly). Are my family and friends proud of me and happy that I finally became a writer? Are they fuck. Have I had any success at all in terms of people buying books and me getting paid? None. Have nasty people who’ve never met me and never had the pain of writing a book for ten or more years slated my efforts on a worldwide forum as if we are somehow old enemies. Does Amazon allow you to delete such thoughtless and unsettling reviews? No they don’t. My family (many of whom think I live in Bolivia, not Botswana) are simply embarrassed that my books are self-published and not published by one of the giant three publishers who dictate what middle-class people (adults and children alike) should read. To make a difference and share my love of writing and all things bookish with other people I started my own publishing company – more embarrassment for my family. What’s he doing? Why don’t you go back to the restaurant (where I worked after school over twenty years ago) you enjoyed that…yes, Mum I did but. Even my dad once called me all the way from Greece to tell me that he had indeed read all of my books but he didn’t like any of them. In order to try and raise money for said publishing company I have further alienated myself from family and friends by asking for money. Rich people, potential investors, in Botswana have all turned their backs preferring to watch me fail and starve in place of enjoying shared success having injected a small amount of capital to help me print books.

To sum up should you follow your dreams and turn your hobby into a passion, into a business. No, you shouldn’t. Humility is not earned it is taught. And I have been beaten down by so many that it is time to bow out of the ring. I will travel the world as the penniless philosopher I have always been and always will be, earning my crust as I go by working in bars and restaurants. Maybe my family were right? Maybe I’ll write a book about it one day?