20 Keys To Success

1. Increase your online followers – Use whatever means necessary to make the number go up. The higher the number the more successful you are in life. da Vinci, Nina Simone, Einstein, those guys didn’t have any Twitter followers and look how they turned out.

2. Obsessively check that number every day –  Frequently experience the anxious nausea of losing one or two followers, then you’ll be able to create, for each unfollower, a conspiracy theory as to why they unfollowed you, which will help your brain grow.

3. Attend Mars Hill Church in Seattle – There you’ll find a good wife who will only speak when spoken to because she’ll know what’s good for her.

4. Online date for the purpose of starting a relationship – This way you’ll come to understand, more acutely than those who do not, the definition of the word “disappointment.”

5. Change careers often –  You’ll then have a wide variety of experiences to draw from when you write your autobiography and publish it on your blog.

6. Join an influential art or writing collective – By doing so you’ll know lots of other artists and writers who will have to advertise your work no matter its quality.

7. Donate money to celebrity Kickstarter campaigns – Because you’ll relieve the overtaxed economies of wealthy people and in turn receive a free DVD, which is pretty cool.

8. Write short stories and submit them to literary journals – By waiting the requisite months after you submit you’ll learn patience, and when you unexpectedly receive a standard rejection letter in your email you’ll have one more than you did before. And if you collect enough you can trade them in for one free literary journal of your choosing…or so the legend goes.

9. Exercise – It’s good for you. And, also, if you go to a class where attractive women or men your age are wearing tight pants you can use the vision of those pants to make your body even more sculpted, enough you’ll mount the courage to ask out your favorite person who wears tight pants, then after that you can use the rejection and the embarrassment of seeing them every day as a reminder of your failures in life so you exercise even more to never be reminded of them again. Exercise, it’s fun!

10. Eat fresh fruits and vegetables – They’re good for you. They’ll help you live longer so in your 80s and 90s when you’re alone and can no longer communicate with the ones who do come and visit every month, or maybe year, you can say yes, I ate healthy my whole life and now look at me, I’m still alive in this great world!

11. Drink water – Yummy, water, the most basic element of life. What else can you say about clean, fresh water except that not everyone in the world has it, so drink up, some people are dying because they don’t have enough of what you just threw down the sink.

12. Make lists on the internet – They help people so much. And if you write enough of them and post them on the internet one day one of them will cure a disease or invent a new type of renewable energy or maybe even solve the problem of nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable world leaders. Make lists, how else is one supposed to be successful?

13. Have opinions on things – It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about the subject you have an opinion on, just have an opinion, that’s important for success. Better yet, write your opinion in a declarative fashion, that way it seems like your opinion is fact. Go ahead, have opinions on things and write about those things. Think-pieces make the world go round and they make you successful.

14. Have you heart broken at least once – Some people will never know what it’s like so consider yourself lucky, you are gaining valuable life experience which will lead you to success, or it could lead you down a dangerous path of self-fulfilling prophecies where the same thing happens over and over and you can no longer tell if you’re the one sabotaging these relationships or if you were predestined to be forever alone, even though you were once sure that all you were meant for in this life was to be in love with the perfect person you saw in your dreams, like in The Princess Bride or whatever fantasy you concocted. But that probably won’t happen, or it will, who knows, life is a bunch of risks!

15. Get married – This will solve any problems you have and make you successful. All the studies show this.

16. Make children – Somehow, if getting married didn’t make you a success, making children will definitely do that. And who doesn’t want more people on this planet, earth will only be a success when every single of one its resources has been completely spent.

17. Get into petty fights with people you love – It helps them know how much you care about them when they see you’re willing to fight about the things that don’t matter. And the more people who know you care, the more successful you’ll be in life. That’s how it works.

18. Make money – If you make enough you can be a terrible person and it pretty much doesn’t matter, people will still treat you the same.

19. Always be sure to have nice things to say to everyone who might help you later on – Even if you don’t believe those things or if you say the opposite to your friends, always be sure to have only good things for people in better positions than you. This is how you get a job in the non-profit sector or in the arts.

20. Network – I can’t say it enough, you must network. It’s best if you start in college – hopefully you know what you want to do in life at 18 – but at worst, start networking in graduate school. The more expensive the school where you network the better, as they know the people who have jobs which pay more. Be sure to follow rule 19, and the rest too, but most of all network. Be careful, though, do not date the same people you network with, or, if you do, be sure to never get upset if someone has sex with you and doesn’t text back. Just consider that part of the networking process.

In the end, it’s simple stuff. Follow these rules and you’ll go far. Kid, I gotta say, the sky’s the limit now.