You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Looking for the magic that’ll rescue you from work

There’s no magic that’ll save you from having to do the work in life. There isn’t some significant alternative state to your life in which, once you enter it, you’re relieved of all the hard work and judgement of success. There’s no lottery win that’ll change everything. Even if you did win the lottery, you’d have learned nothing — it‘s not repeatable, and you can’t just do it again when you need to. What you need is the learning of repeatable or reproducible actions or processes. Otherwise it’s not you doing it — any success gained is not your success. Therefore, in order to achieve success, be prepared for a proportional amount of actual effort to put in. It’s not going to happen with no effort or work, but our response to the word “work” can vary according to what we mean by work.

In our minds, are we equating “work” to someone digging a ditch, laying railway tracks, banging metal in a workshop? Does a graphic designer do any work — you don’t hear any banging sounds, so is there any work happening? Does a photographer work — I’m remembering of course the days when there was such a thing as a professional photographer and their phone used to ring — people wondered, where’s the work in just pressing the shutter? Does a salesperson do any work — at least some days in a month, yes they probably do — their work is persuasion. Does marketing count as work? Some of it certainly does — a lot of their work is even a mystery to themselves, as you’ll discover in the world of social media marketing, but a lot of it is promotion, and if that work isn’t done, the product isn’t promoted.

There’s also no magic idea that is likely to occur to you that will change the world and make your fortune just by itself. There’s plenty of good ideas, but absolutely none that are self-propelled so that just simply having the idea is all that is required to happen. No good idea is so good that you can then sit back and reap the rewards without any further effort. All ideas require development and implementation, but further, they require promotion and persuasion, and those last two are usually much more work than the first two.

Unfortunately, a mediocre idea that has been thoroughly promoted to a critical mass of people, persuading them  that it is perhaps a better idea than it really is — stands every chance of succeeding. Whereas, an excellent idea that has not been promoted very much — only a few people around you even know it exists and most of them don’t understand the benefits properly — stands every chance of staying exactly where it is. This indicates the potency of promotion and persuasion and that they are stronger forces than a good idea alone. It might even be the case that with skilful and industrious promoting and persuading, you don’t even need an idea at all, just a process of work that can be exercised.