How to Be a Complete and Utter Failure in Life, Work & Everything: 44 1/2 Steps to Lasting Underachievement

Chapter Thirty-one. Don’t ask, “How do you do that?” Don’t act “as if.” And don’t be naïve

Quote to avoid

	“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, until I finally became that person. Or he became me.”
	--Cary Grant (formerly Archie Leech)

If you’ve never done something before, don’t find someone who has, and don’t ask him the question: “How do you do that?” And never add: “Oh, and can I take notes?” Having asked that question of loads of successful people, on planes, trains, and automobiles, and anywhere else I come into contact with them, again purely for research, do you know what happens? Sometimes they tell me, in just 10 minutes, something it took them 25 years to find out. You must never do the same.

I once asked Richard Emmanuel, a young ...