Why I Can't Stand Motivational Speakers. Louis Shalako.

Learn to suck your own cock, and maybe try and be a little bit more like me.

Louis Shalako

 

I was drowning one day. I had already gone down twice, kicking my way back up to the surface in pure desperation when something caught my eye.

I saw a man standing on the riverbank. He had a bright and shiny look on his face. He had a stick, and on the end of that stick, there was a big, juicy, T-bone, and he was waving it in my face, mouthing words of encouragement.

Talk about motivation—all thoughts of imminent demise gone, I wanted to kill that man real bad.

Finally floundering ashore, no thanks to you, sir. He tossed the stick and the steak aside, and I chased him down the boardwalk, only to see him climb into a big, long, shiny black car and go zooming off down the road.

I didn’t need motivation, Mister. What I needed was a rope.

Motivational speakers and lottery tickets have much in common. They encourage you to dream. 

For whatever that’s worth…dreams are cheap.

The power of positive thinking is highly overrated. We can sit around thinking positive thoughts all God-damned day long, which achieves nothing except procrastination.

What we need, in order to change a situation, or even our lives, are positive actions.

Mandino: get yourself some nice generalities, e.g., love your customers, for they are sheep.

Motivational speakers know nothing about you, your life or your circumstances. This means that their advice is purely generic. It fits as many individuals, lives and sets of circumstances as possible. In that sense, anyone can be a motivational speaker. All you need is a nice set of generalities.

The people who really need such advice can’t afford the price of admission. The people who can afford the price of admission, have everything they could possibly need and probably don’t need the advice to begin with. For all I care, they can toss and turn all night long, dreaming and sweating over the next billion-dollar start-up.

It’s a lot like religion, and possibly the last legal scam there is.

Just for the record, my mother gave me a copy of Unlimited Power, by Tony Robbins for Christmas one year. I did read it, but then I will read almost anything. I’ve read Dale Carnegie, I’ve read Leo Buscaglia and Og Mandino. I have read the magazines. Success Unlimited comes to mind, the fact is that my mother had dozens, hundreds of books, magazines, tapes, VHS tapes, CDs and all the same stuff in every available format.

When has my mother ever needed motivation? She’s still working, mostly because she wants to, at the grand age of 85. She figures that not only will she live longer, but enjoy a higher quality of life, and this much is probably true—

My mother has never needed motivation, ladies and gentlemen.

An opportunity, maybe, an even break, maybe—but not motivation.

What strikes me, is that if you are looking for positive motivation, a lottery ticket is more escapism than anything else. Also, I can only wonder about all of those books and tapes.

Perhaps if you had saved your money, put it in a bank at almost any kind of interest rate, soon it would grow into something much more useful than shelf after shelf of motivational books, gathering dust and not much good to anyone at that point. You're out there, working your lousy ass off, just so you can fill your shelves with books, tapes, VHS bullshit, attending the seminars and conferences, all produced by the most worthless of human types.

If a pep talk could do anything, anything at all, to change someone’s life, I am surprised that some bright person downtown hasn’t considered paying Tony Robbins to come to town, go down to Rainbow Park, and talk those people into changing their lives.

They could walk barefoot on hot coals, a confidence-trick that goes back millennia, all the way to the fakirs of India and beyond.

What you need is a plan. What you need to do is to take small, incremental steps, for all change is incremental, and a life is a big thing to change.

It’s not quite as easy as handing a million dollars to a loser, one who has experienced zero personal growth as a person, and expecting them to do anything that is particularly different than what they were doing before. They’ll just continue to do all the same things, only more so, and maybe even worse, in some cases.

Buscaglia: Think positive, for I want another Ferrari.

The trouble with change, of course, is that change is hard. It takes hard work, commitment, and more than anything else, time. 

Nothing is going to happen overnight.

That, I think, is why people just give it up and go back to the old, unproductive ways.

If you don’t believe in the power of positive thinking, you can always try the power of negative thinking.

You don’t have to take any positive, or even negative actions at all.

All you have to do is to sit there and think negative thoughts. Work real hard, and try to surround yourself with as many negative-minded people you can find.

It works better than you could ever imagine.

And if you don’t believe me, ask your mother.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is the latest in The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.

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Thank you for reading.