BEING FREE AND UPGRADING YOUR LIFE

I write this from the suite of a five-star hotel in central London. Gaia is about to have a swim. Later we’ll walk into Soho for a Chinese meal. Tomorrow morning, we’ll sit in the spa here and prepare for the F**k It Days we’re doing here over the weekend.

And you may well have noticed that I’ve referred to a few hotels during the course of this book. And they are all lovely hotels, too. It’s not that we’re loaded and money is no object, it’s that I’ve learned how to upgrade.

Let’s start with this one. It’s the week before Easter, and London is busier than ever in the year of the Olympics. And yet we’re sitting and swimming and sleeping and eating in the very lap of luxury in the heart of it all for… well, the room I booked cost 40 percent of the usual room-rate price. And when we arrived at reception just now, the receptionist happened to be Italian and, without us even asking, upgraded us to a suite. And I’ve just looked up the price of a suite. So we’re now paying a measly 25 percent of the ‘advertised’ room-rate price.

We live an Upgraded Life, and I’m about to teach you how. It takes a lot of F**k It. First, let’s look at the actual upgrade (which is usually the last part of the process).

I’ve been upgraded in every single one of the last ten hotels I’ve stayed in. I’m not a business user. I’m scruffy as hell. So how do I do it? First, be incredibly polite to the receptionist. Take a real interest in them – not because you’re about to ask for an upgrade, but because you’re actually interested in them (there’s a difference and it’s felt). Now, if you’ve booked your room through a discount bookings agency, there’s a chance you’ve been given the smallest room in the hotel, and the receptionist will know that. But, unless they take a real shine to you (as just happened here), they’ll still go ahead and install you in that room (many four-star hotels nowadays, for example, have utilized very small spaces then decked them out wonderfully, so that they can still make money when they discount online). So you take your key-card, grab your luggage, and head to the elevators, knowing that you’ll be down again in three minutes. Go to the room; put your bag in the hall. Don’t touch anything. Don’t sit on the bed. Just check it’s not the suite already and you got lucky. Then leave your bag there and go back down to reception. Be really polite, and say that you’ve just been to the room, that you actually want to spend a lot of time in the room over your stay as you have a lot of work to do, and would it be possible to have a bigger room, please… and that you’d be so grateful if s/he could help you out. Then add that you haven’t touched anything in the room, you haven’t even sat down. And, rooms permitting (which they usually are), s/he’ll upgrade you.

That’s the actual upgrade. What about the room you booked into at a fraction of the cost? Just 20 minutes of hard work on the web. You need two or three great discount booking sites. And you occasionally need to take a risk. Lastminute.com, for example, have something called ‘Secret Hotels,’ which offer incredible discounts, but you don’t know exactly where they are, or what they’re called, or what they’re like. You try your best to establish where they are, etc., from the details they give. One thing I’ve noticed is that once you’ve found out the details of a ‘Secret Hotel’ (which you do by booking and staying there once), they always use the same code on the site. So I now know the ‘code’ of five or six hotels in London. The deals are usually 50 percent or less. So you can stay in a four- or five-star hotel for the price of a two-star, or less – a hostel. You can sleep rough in the best hotels in town. That’s how you live this part of the Upgraded Life.

Clearly your best chance of upgrading across the board is to travel, stay, rent, eat, view, out of season during periods or times that other people wouldn’t think to travel, stay, rent, eat, or view. You can have the lifestyle of a celebrity if you’re able to pick and choose when you move around (unless, of course, you are a celebrity, in which case you’re probably being followed around by someone with a camera, you’re already booked into the best rooms in town, and you’re not particularly bothered about the idea of literal upgrading). But you’re hanging on for what you know is the bigger point here, which is… how to upgrade your life above and beyond upgrading your hotel rooms and flights.

I said that the hotel upgrading takes a little ‘F**k It’… F**k It, I can do this. It takes some chutzpah. What it also takes is the belief that you DESERVE it. Yes, I may have only paid a few bucks for a space in this hotel, but I know they’ve got a lovely suite up there that no one’s booked for tonight, and I DESERVE that luxury.

And to feel we deserve something, we have to have a positive view of ourselves. Back in the hotel I could elaborate the auto-conversation thus: ‘You John, are a wonderful man; you support your family; you bring something interesting and helpful to the world in the form of F**k It – my God, the least you deserve is a luxurious room to rest your head tonight.’ Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a process of self-justification, this is self-worth. Self-justification comes from low self-worth: ‘I know I don’t deserve this, but I should really have it because, after all, no one else is staying there, and if I don’t then it’s just a waste anyway, and why would you want to waste when there are people out there sleeping on the streets, blah, blah excuse, excuse, blah.’

So start by appreciating yourself big time. Pat yourself on the back (it’s also good for the qi anyway) and say, ‘Well done, you… you really are doing SO well in life… you deserve the very best that life has to offer.’

You really do deserve the very best that life has to offer. So start to expect it. Develop a sense of entitlement (in the best sense of that word, not the spoiled brat, trust-funded, silver-spoon type sense of entitlement) that you deserve the very best in life. And not just in terms of the material things (and the literal upgrades), but in every aspect of life: you deserve the best opportunities, the best relationships, the best health, the best chance to follow your dreams, the best sex, the best wine, the best friends.

So, yes, go say F**k It and upgrade your hotel. But say F**k It, too, to your self-doubts, your limited beliefs, your sense of being a victim of life’s vicissitudes, and feel you deserve the best… go say F**k It and Upgrade Your Life.