Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
A human can comprehend approximately two numbers.
That’s it.
Don’t ever offer a bunch of numbers to a human at the same time. Try to offer only two numbers at any one time. Feel like a wild, risk-taking kind of guy? OK, offer three numbers at a time. Beyond that? A waste of time.
Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.
A human will find it easy to believe what the human would like to believe.
That’s it.
In others, when presenting an idea, if you want it accepted, then express it in a way that they would like it to be true. “Now this snake oil may not make you look like Robert Redford, but it will help to bring out the handsome devil you really are inside.”
In yourself, always be chary of thinking you’ve got it right, just because you’d like it to be that way. And if you’d really, really like it to be that way, check your facts twice!
Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.
Wichita Falls, Texas. Spring 1971 — A bright idea pays off.
Havingness, noun, Your willingness, often automatic, to experience something in your life; how much you are ‘having’ of something, such as: love-life, money, nice apartment, etc.
From puberty to age 26, I had been incompetent in learning about women, and then one day it dawned upon me that this was something I could systematically learn. I’d learned other things; why not learn this?
So I did. I studied carefully, and then discovered that the Havingness Concept provides a key that makes it easy …
The easiest time to get a job is when you got a job. The easiest time to get a girlfriend is, ulp, when you got a girlfriend. The easiest time to find an apartment is when you got an apartment. It takes money to make money.
These are metaphysical statements. I can’t prove them. But go find any human, and have him experiment, and he will report it seems to work that way.
You have an inner gauge we’ll call ‘havingness’, how much of something you can experience. Maybe you can experience money easily, but girlfriends not so well. It’s running on automatic, so just your wanting it to be different doesn’t make it so. In fact, the more desparately you desire the thing, the more sharply you are focussing your lack, and this self-fullfilling target perpetuates itself, in accordance with your inner vision.
For example, let’s say you’re male and there’s an acute lack of girlfriend. It seems like you don’t meet anyone; and the ones you do meet, well, there’s something wrong with them.
If you keep on doing what you been doing, you’ll keep on having what you been having. So if you make no change, you’ll suffer lack of girlfriend for far longer than need be. This is an easy thing to change, when you’re willing to change your focus.
Hard to find a girlfriend? OK, it’s an illusion, but when you are inside that illusion, it sure looks like that. Therefore, let’s just set it aside and look at something else.
Instead of trying to change the girlfriend shortage (which appears very difficult), let’s just look at changing your internal level of ‘Havingness’. (Which will appear surprisingly easy.)
Here’s what you do: First, stop saying no. Start going out with anybody at all. Go out with people you’re not interested in. Any female at all, go out for any reason whatsoever. And go out five times a week! Don’t be “reasonable” and scale it down. Five times a week.
Remember, just now, you’re not trying to find a girlfriend. These folks aren’t girlfriend material for you at this time. (Don’t sleep with them. That will just snarl you up.) Just go out five times a week, and enjoy it as best you can. Without expectation and target-seeking, you’ll generally find yourself having fun, you wild guy you.
Remember, again, that you are engaging in this activity — five times a week — in order to increase your internal, automatic ‘havingness’ level. It’s a fair amount of work, so don’t do big productions. Go out for coffee. Go to the library with someone. Go to the laundromat. Keep it simple. Do this for a few weeks and watch what happens.
It’s quite surprising. Suddenly, mysteriously, attractive and interesting women will begin to fall out of the sky. You can’t go to the parking lot without bumping into several. At least, it will seem that way. And, they’ll start giggling and smiling at you.
Now, start asking them out. You’ll discover that much of your normal clumsiness will have vanished! You’ll now find it surprisingly easy. You have changed something internally; the world looks different. Without trying, you have stepped outside of the former illusion.
But don’t make the blunder of stopping your program. For now, continue going out five times a week. You’re not done yet. This simple and pleasant exercise is what’s building your internal, automatic havingness level. Keep that going for a while, because even more attractive women will show up the next week! Further, the longer you run this program, the more “permanent” it becomes.
You see, without even worrying about the cause of your internal programming, you have changed it. The old program, the old restricted-havingness level, cannot stand against the evidence of your eyes, your ears, and your other senses. When you actually see yourself going out frequently, your internal program will change immediately and automatically. No psychotherapy required. Call it magic. Call it human nature. But call it; and it will come.
Havingness — how to Have what you want — a concept that opens any area of your life where you’d like to have more. You’re now seeing more of what you’d like to see. Why? Because, knowing how to look, you begin to see. Learning to see, there’s a lot to like! This is a workable map.
Do you want things different? Follow this map.
You will see.
Shady Shores community, near Dallas, Texas, 1964: In college, my roommates and I lived on a lake, in a concrete-block house made from a garage, just behind the grand house of Mr. J. D. Lingo, who operated a Dallas heavy-equipment business. I don’t know what that means, except that surely it involves large equipment.
Because my roommates found jobs as banquet waiters, I also applied at the Holiday Inn, and found myself a bellboy, and I also carried breakfast orders to the rooms. I became very proud of my skill in balancing the huge tray loaded with dishes and cups.
It was also fun to call in from the pool phone, on the busy summer days, and request Mrs. Heflin at the switchboard to page Mr. T. S. Elliot. She paged him again and again, but he never answered the page.
My life changed due to James, the cajun.
He’d come from the bayou and it lived still in his speech. Outside a bar in Lake Charles, he’d saved his friend from a drunk driver, but lost a leg in the act. Once living in Nashville, he knew the young Elvis. A fine boy, Elvis, and sober. Or, as James said, “I’ve got my first time to see him take a drink.”
That Fall, as we returned to classes, James decided to return to Lake Charles. He told Mr. Kahler the manager. He told Ron Johnson, the assistant manager. Mr. Kahler did nothing, and Ron did nothing. Ron told James that if he left, Mr. Kahler would have a fit.
But James said he was going to Lake Charles on that date, regardless.
James was the night auditor; he worked from 11 at night till 7 in the morning, and balanced out the bookkeeping machine at the front desk. The difficulty was in finding a replacement.
They did nothing. He left.
I showed up at the office, and said I could do it.
Having no better plan, they let me try. I knew nothing, but there was a single form on which this balancing was done. It all added up in plusses and minuses, and a big arrow showed which two totals had to agree. I was able to figure it out.
So I became the night auditor.
In a way, this was a student’s dream job, because — the way I did it — they paid me for sleeping. I came to work, balanced the books by 1 am, then retrieved the pillow stolen from housekeeping (which I hid daytimes inside the back panel of the switchboard), and then slept on the floor behind the front desk. Paid hourly; for sleeping on the job. Neat!
I admit it startled a few late-arriving guests. Walking up to the front desk, they’d tap the bell, and then I appeared, rising like Dracula from beneath the desk.
Once, very early, Ron the assistant manager unexpectedly came through the back door. He said that if Mr. Kahler saw me sleeping, that Mr. Kahler would have a fit.
But Ron often threatened that Mr. Kahler would have a fit. I was uncertain whether to worry, or not.
As it happened, a few days later, my roommate Pat was drinking iced tea behind the front desk. Pat was a nice-looking guy who resembled Jules, or perhaps it was Jim, from the French film Jules et Jim. Pat was also the desk clerk.
Ron told Pat that if Mr. Kahler saw those empty iced-tea glasses, that Mr. Kahler would have a fit. Oddly enough, just then Mr. Kahler walked through the front door.
Behind the desk, Pat stood up, and held up an empty iced-tea glass, so that Mr. Kahler could see it. Pat said to Mr. Kahler, “Have a fit?”
Mr. Kahler gave Pat a puzzled look, and disappeared into the restaurant. Mr. Kahler had said nothing; and Mr. Kahler didn’t have a fit.
It was Ron who had the fit.
Neat!
St. Louis, Winter 1967: I was saving up my money, so I got two jobs.
Days: Yard clerk at the Rock Island Railroad.
Nights: Night Manager at the Hilton Inn.
With different days off, only three days had me working both jobs. At night from eleven, until seven in the morning, I ran the front desk at the Airport Hilton Inn. (Usually pretty quiet, except that time the Stones arrived). In the wee hours, I balanced the NCR 1600 bookeeping machine, and in the morning …
I walked through the halls and past the aviary — a large cage with the tiniest, quickest tropical birds, bright as a paint kit, and full of song so early, with cheery quick eyes askance — onward, to the Olde Weste Coffee Shoppe for my free breakfast. Oh, that was grand!
Then, piloting the volkswagen home to my unheated trailor, just off the end of the jet runway at St. Louis International Airport. Though the planes were very loud, I slept soundly.
A quick sleep it was, as needs be I’m up and dressed in Sears insulated underwear, thick roustabout clothes, and big brogan-style boots. Off to the Rock Island Railroad, Carrie Street station.
Not a passenger stop, no. A rough-looking switchyard in a rough part of town. Here’s how it works:
There is a local railroad called the Terminal Railroad. Their only job is to go around St. Louis, to the real railroads: Southern Pacific, Santa Fe, Rock Island. Railroads hand off cars to other railroads, and Carrie Street was the Rock Island switching station.
When the Terminal Railroad showed up, I stood beside the track. They have 54 cars for the Rock, that’s us. Our switch foreman, Danny, would tell them to put the cars into our switching tracks 7, 8, and 9. As they backed the cars into these tracks, I stood alongside and wrote down the cars and their numbers, as fast as I could. (If I could write them as the cars passed me, then I didn’t have to walk up and down the tracks writing them down.)
The conductor on the Terminal Railroad would give a thick wad of the “Bills of Lading” to the Bill Clerk. These are forms that show where the cars are going, and what’s been laeded into them, laddie.
Me and the bill clerk sorted them, to discover we had sixteen cars for Kansas City, fourteen for Oakland, and so on. The switch foreman Danny figured how to move these long strings of cars around so as to get all the Kansas City ones together. It took most of the day.
Then, our train took off to Kansas City and points west. I think that, on the other shift, some of those cars went back east, but I never saw them, and for all I know there are thousands stranded somewhere out west.
Danny, the switch foreman, was a young fellow, and acted very sour. I think it helped him control his tough-guy crew. So I would often annoy him by striding through the bitter cold, along the track outside the switch shanty (while they huddled around the coal stove). I’d swing my arms wide, taking big strides.
In a loud voice, I sang, “Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! Oh, the Rock Island line is the road to ride! Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! If you want to ride, you gotta ride it like you find it, get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island line!”
Sometimes my voice cracked, but it was never less than completely chipper and enthusiastic. And loud.
This goober act never failed to amaze Danny and the switch crew, and they pretended disgust with such cheerfulness, while I in turn pretended not to notice nor comprehend in any way.
Just before eleven each night, in the office bathroom, I’d change into my suit and black shoes. Then off to the Hilton Inn, to balance those books.
In the St. Louis winter, daylight comes late and night falls early. Some cold and snowy days there were when the sun hardly showed. During one stretch it had been over a week since I saw the sun, and snow fell heavy that day.
That evening, trudging across the yard toward the office, underneath the yard’s lamps high on their poles, I noticed that all the falling snow ahead of me, and the snow upon the ground ahead, glittered in sharp bright points, so beautiful they were, glittering.
Glittering before me like gold.
Sometimes she will say, “One of these days I’m going to have a real bedroom that’s quiet, like a real person.” For example.
I’ve been thinking about this real person …
These days, we enjoy Sunday pancakes and omelettes at Two Bird cafe. On our drive home, I inquired to learn more about this real person. Here is what I have learned …
A real person lives in a nice house, with adequate nice grounds around the house, and the house is well-maintained. The real person has lots of time for fun projects, playing with the dog, and has help around the nice house.
The real person drives a decent car. It might not be new, but it needs no body work, and it’s clean. You don’t have to struggle with the shift lever. You never need to worry about this car, because nothing is broken.
The real person has mostly casual clothes, but a few party things, because the real person is invited to parties by friends, and also invited to parties by friends of those friends. With these friends, the real person goes on tours and to dinner.
The real person is not lazy, and works, of course. The real person works about 5-6 hours a day, Monday through Thursday. In order to support this nice house, car, clothes, friends, tours, dinners, and parties, it would seem that the real person would need a take-home pay of about $4500 monthly from this work.
This work could be anything. Whatever a real person wanted to do. For example, it could be dog walking, or something healthy and fun. Now this might not bring in the entire $4500 after-tax income; but, if not, the real person’s partner would chip in.
The real person has a love partner, of course. This other person would also be a real person, because no real person would be with a workaholic. The partner would not be somebody who spent all day in front of a computer, for example.
So the partner, being a real person, also works 3-4 days a week, for somewhat limited hours, and they have time to spend together. I suppose that the partner must bring in even more after-tax dollars, so that the chipping in part works out.
So, now I know, for the first time, what a real person is. I’ve been wondering, and now I know.
Clarity is a wonderful thing.
San Francisco, 1976: You have dialed (415) 751-4022. A click, and one of those new answering machines begins speaking. It says …
“Hello! You have reached the lejurious office of the Thumbtack Bugle, high atop Third Avenue. Right now, we’re out on motorcycles, putting up posters all over town, but this machine would be as happy as a machine ever gets to take any short message you might care to leave. I’m now going to make a beeping sound by magic. Behold!”
And then a beeping sound. Another thrilling chapter of …
The Thumbtack Bugle — We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all over town!
When I was very young, perhaps 9, I was visiting at my grandparents farm, 8 miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Two-storied, white with a red roof, it stood atop a hill with a wreath of tall trees around it.
With my grandmother in her cool, shady kitchen, I chattered. The conversation must have related to taking credit for one’s accomplishments, because she said, “Unless you toot your own horn, same horn shall not be tooteth!”
Honest, those were the exact words she used. She didn’t talk like that all the time. She was making a joke. And, at the time, I thought it hilariously funny. I laughed and laughed. It was so funny that, here 50 years later, I can quote her words exactly.
So perhaps it was fated …
In the days when I’d started my first business, Simple Simon Bookkeeping, my first client was Phil Groves who had just set up his ice-cream shop, Raskin-Flakkers, in the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco.
About a year later, I had several bookkeeping clients, and my daily hours (1-4pm Monday-Friday) had begun to seem busy! On many days, I actually got several calls!
This particular day, it was Phil Groves calling, and he’d got a motorcycle. He had therefore decided to start an advertising leaflet, a single printed page called the “Thumbtack Bugle”, containing short classified ads, and he would tack this leaflet on all the bulletin boards all around San Francisco.
Since I had regular telephone hours, he wanted to know if I could handle the telephone communications? We made some arrangement, and I was the marketing front-end for the Bugle.
He sold darn few classified ads. It took an eternity to put up all the flyers. Even carrying other folks posters along for ten dollars didn’t make it worth-while. Therefore he attempted to hire two half-wits to do the job. They lasted about two weeks, and the Bugle went into mothballs.
A year later, and one night I had a dream. In the dream, I’d been to Marin County, to look at an apartment, and was driving back across the Golden Gate bridge in an open, red convertible. The sun was glorious, the air clean, and in this dream I thought to myself, “Now that Paul (my younger brother back in Texas) has gone off to college, he’s not using his dirt-bike motorcycle any more. If I had him ship it, I could start up the Bugle again!”
I woke up, and began making my plans. I called Phil Groves and made a deal, then figured out how to change the rates, the route, and to focus on carrying posters for other folks.
I made a logo. It was a bugle on a cord, held up by a big thumbtack. From the bell of the bugle came the large word: “Toot!”
With this logo at the top, I designed a new poster, a big one, that said “We distribute your posters to bulletin boards all across town.” While I was laying it out, a phone call interrupted.
It was a religious group, calling long-distance from Nevada City, California. They had a poster to go up. Was this the Thumbtack Bugle? Were we still in business?
“We are,” I said.
“I got this one,” she said, holding up a white plastic sack with a cute pink drawcord. “It’s silly, though, because I saw one of these over at [somebody’s] house, and looked all over to find one.” She looked at me expectantly.
“So I see you found one?” I said.
“Well, duh, yeah,” she said, “but the point is that they have rows and rows of brown grocery-store bags, and I was hunting all over for this kind, because I saw this kind.”
We all do this. We overlook a solution to our problem, because we’re holding some other picture in the mind. The mind is a targeting device. It gets a picture and then searches to find it. Picturing a white bag, we’ll overlook hundreds of brown bags.
Is that really … seeing?
People say, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” I think, rather, we should be very careful about what we picture, as we’ll probably spend lots of time seeking it.
Maybe we’re seeking after what seems urgent. Because it looks urgent. Maybe we overlook what’s actually important.
Now and then, for a fresh view of what’s important, visit Jim Sloman’s site at May You Be Happy.com. Always a new view. See for yourself.
That is the lesson of the paper bag.
