Who will bring you your success? Who is responsible for ensuring that your success always accompanies you through life? There are two fundamentally different ways to have success: the first is to create your own success, to achieve it with your own efforts, the second is to expect it as a gift from the world, or, more realistically, to receive it at someone else’s expense. The choice between these methods is your main choice, your pain or your main life success. This choice is rarely made by a conscious decision from the head, more often it is a fundamental, existential choice that permeates a person through and through, ringing through all his deeds and actions, building all his other choices and decisions.
This choice is made by each person in the very first weeks of his life.
Here is a situation, utterly simple: a child is lying in a crib, he is bored. What to do? You can start hitting the rattles that hang above him with your hands, you can simply shake your arms and legs, or you can even try to roll over to the other side and crawl where you can see ahead: it’s difficult, but very interesting. This is how the Actor decided in his choice.
And you can do nothing of this, continue to lie and be bored. But it’s not easy, but to start crying into the world: then the Big Wizards appear and they themselves knock on rattles. And if you start screaming louder and more demanding in crying, then you can find yourself in your arms and shake yourself until a sweet dream, that is, for as long as you like. Thus was born the Parasite.
Every child makes this choice, makes it within himself, and if he has his own choice, then for the rest of his life he only strengthens himself in it, trains himself to live in this choice in the best possible way. If he has the choice of the Doer, he, hour after hour and day after day, teaches himself activity and responsibility, but if he has the choice of the Parasite, then year after year he trains himself as a magnificent Parasite: he teaches himself to make unhappy muzzles, tired shoulders, offended intonations and other decorations of the unjustly struck Victim.
A parasite can get along well in life, at one time be a cheerful, creative, and sweet person, but this is a person who lives on the success of someone else and chooses irresponsibility in life. The doer, on the other hand, builds his life himself, looks for a deed that he will do himself, and knows that only he is responsible for both his victories and his defeats. At the same time, the person-doer does not at all object to sometime using someone else’s help (“We like everything that is useful for the cause!”), But even he organizes this help himself, rather than expecting it drearily and crying in its absence.
Total choice or percentages?
Question: Why does the author so rigidly divide people into Doers and Parasites, since he himself recently wrote that everyone has everything? Maybe it’s better in percentages — for example: today I am 67% a parasite, and 33% an activist, and therefore I have the right to lie on the couch two-thirds of the time?
Answer: hard division may not be entirely correct, but it WORKS. If you think about your life, about its maximum, then it definitely worked …