HOW TO BECOME A TOTAL FAILURE

My full-time occupation is print broker. I serve my customers printing needs by shopping the best values, arranging for and assisting the proofing process, attending press checks, following up on deliveries, and if needed, interfacing with the mailing house. When I’m busy I barely have time to breathe. Lately I haven’t been so busy–in fact the whole printing industry is in a slump. I’ve heard that nationally printers are down by 40%. Yes, 40%! That’s huge. I speak of printing because it is the industry I know best. I write a blog about it Talking Through My Hat–A Print Broker’s Ruminations. From watching the news I realize that my industry isn’t the only one taking it on the chin.

How did this happen? How did a relatively few SOB’s manage to steer the whole pickin’ economy into the ditch? I won’t be answering that question here because it will take decades for experts to unravel it.  I’m sure it will be the subject of many future Master Thesis’ and Dissertations. There will be books, historical novels, and fiction. Then will come the movies, and mini-series dramas. We will hear more about the crash of 2009 than we ever wanted to know, but will we ever get to the bottom of it? I don’t think so. We won’t understand it any more than we understand what happened on Black Tuesday.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying we won’t have the facts. There will be facts enough to fill what used to be the World Trade Towers, but facts are often used to obscure the truth rather than reveal it. What’s the saying, oh yeah, “If you can’t overwhelm them with brilliance, dazzel them with B.S.” You can trust me on this, if you turn your nose into the wind, you can already smell the B.S. 

No one will accept responsibility. No one will step forward and say, “I made a mistake.” The ones with the fattest wallets will hide behind the best army of lawyers that money can buy, and they will become invisible. If anyone pays for this attack on the American economy and the American people you can bet it won’t be the ones who are really responsible. And if by some fluke one of them has the bad luck to be hung out as a scapegoat, the real truth will still not come out. A stack of bibles and an angel with a flaming sword couldn’t get them to spill the truth. And maybe they couldn’t because no one person or circumstance made it happen.

If I get honest with myself and I think about how many grass roots people were trying to live the American dream by buying homes that they had to know were more than they could afford, or how many were trying to get rich by flipping houses, or how many were buying real estate mutual funds? I can see that there is blame enough to go around. There was a real estate feeding frenzy going on.

Can we keep this kind of thing from happening again? George Santanya said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  If we continue in practicing the failure rules something much worse could happen. The rules are:

1. Resist learning anything new that could lead to more responsibility–
2. Don’t share what you know with others–
3. Be a jerk!–
4. Always look out for Number One–
5. It’s all about the money–
6. Promise things you have no intention of doing–
7. It’s always someone else’s fault–
8. Truth is in the mind of the beholder–
9. Do the least that’s necessary for success–
10. The customer is someone you have to put up with–

Get the book “How To Become A Total Failure” and learn more about the above list of failure rules.

Written by Bill Ruesch blog author of Talking Through My Hat, A Print Broker’s Ruminations www.billprintbroker.com