I remember the day I reached the breaking point.
It was August of 1973. On a morning in the middle of the month, in Washington, D.C., I piled into my car and headed for work. By 9 A.M., the temperature was well over 90 degrees, and the humidity was close to 100 percent. My car, a 1972 Subaru, had no air-conditioning. I drove through the elegant residential section of Georgetown, past the new, prestigious office buildings on K Street, and aimed for the low-rent district, where my office was.
On the corner of 11th and Pennsylvania Avenue, The Washington Star once had its office. But the Star, although on the verge of bankruptcy, had decided that the neighborhood was far too squalid for the general well-being of its employees. It had moved, and left the building to be infested by rats and winos. After a few months, the federal government took over the building, steam-cleaned the walls, put in fiberboard partitions, and started renting the space to the most lowly government agencies. That was where my office was—I was a trial attorney for the Federal Trade Commission.
At about 9:30, I pulled into the garage next to the building. The garage was seven levels deep. By the time I reached the seventh level, the heat and dust were intense. Drunks lurked in the corners, making hideous grunting sounds. I took myself up to the street level and squinted in the sunlight. A few feet away from me were still more derelicts lined up against the wall of the old Star building, urinating against the wall. In broad daylight they stood there. No policeman, no building guard, no one at all stopped them. I hurried past them into my building.
But the door to my office was closed. On it was a sign telling me that my office had been assigned to someone else. I was to report to room 710. Obviously, no one had consulted me, and naturally, that was par for the course.
I walked down the linoleum halls with their lime-green fiberboard partitions and managed not to disturb the secretaries who were playing games with their children. You see, in our office, the secretaries simply refused to do any work, and their bosses were far too craven to insist that any work be done, so the secretaries brought their families to the office and spent their days playing and listening to the radio.
When I saw my new space, I felt my heart muscles constrict dangerously. Room 710 was a broom closet that should not have been assigned to a janitor on probation. It was so narrow that I couldn’t get past the edge of my desk to get behind it without walking sideways. It was so shallow that it didn’t have room for a chair in front of the desk.
In a frenzy of anger, I rushed to my boss’s office to demand to know why I’d been installed in that insulting, tiny cubicle. But he was in Minnesota. I went to the deputy bosses, two giggling numbskulls whose only visible skills lay in flattering the boss.
“It’s just temporary,” they said. “You’ll be moved soon.” They both clipped their nails while they spoke to me.
“When?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” they said. “Sometime soon.”
With that, I was dismissed. I went back to my horrible office, feeling desperate. Through my small window, I could see a haze of bus exhaust rising up from Pennsylvania Avenue toward my cell. It was seven floors down to the pavement. That would do the trick.
A messenger arrived, visibly staggering from the effects of marijuana, and laid a file folder on my desk. It was an assignment from my deputy bosses. Apparently there had been complaints about the Vegematic product, and I was being ordered to buy one to see if it really could slice ripe tomatoes. “The results of your investigation should be reported to us no later than one month from now,” said the accompanying memorandum.
Without meaning to, I started to cry. Something had gone terribly wrong with my life. I’d gone to good schools, where we’d all been told that we were the cream of the crop of humanity, destined to win its glittering prizes at early ages. The same man (me) who now parked his car in a garage whose air would have shamed a 19th-century coal mine had contemplated the greatest mysteries of social organization at the feet of men who guided the destiny of the world. This same man who had to walk gingerly past urinating bums in a section of town considered unsafe for tourists had been elected by his fellow law students to speak to them at their graduation about the meaning of law and life.
Now, just a few short years after graduating from law school in a sunny haze of expectation and pride, I was sitting in a cubicle on the whim of cretinous jackasses, ordered to determine whether a Vegematic would slice a tomato cleanly, and being gradually overcome by fumes from the street below.
Could I quit? Of course not. I had no money. I was lucky if I could pay my credit-card bill every month. I had enough funds to live for maybe two weeks without a paycheck.
Could I get another job? Perhaps, but the prospects weren’t good.
Maybe I could change my name and start again in another city. Then again, there was always that seventh-floor window….
I started to ruminate upon my friends’ situations. There was little encouragement. The men and women who’d gone to school, taken the right courses, and done their homework might have more elegant offices, and they might be in better parts of town (although some were in actual combat zones of major cities), but almost all of them knew that they were trapped. Some made more money and some made less, but none of them were making real money, the kind that buys the true showpieces of human life.
When we’d get together for dinner, we’d all worry about whether we’d have enough money to leave a good tip. When our American Express bills came in the mail, our hearts went into our mouths. We drove old cars and took chartered-flight vacations even as we headed toward our 30th years on earth.
We found ourselves at the mercy of petty tyrants in the forms of junior partners or deputy assistant directors or secretaries who brought their infant children to the office. Instead of the limitless vistas of opportunity that we assumed were on our horizons, we looked out into eight-by-six-foot offices with lime green walls, and onto steamy downtown streets clogged with exhaust.
Even the most brilliant of us were working on small matters that led nowhere intellectually, financially, or socially.
I stepped back and thought about the people I knew from high school as well as those from college and law school. Their desperation was just as great. Trapped as junior salesmen; as adjusters; as operatives within huge bureaucracies, private or public, they saw the same miserable frustration in their lives as everyone else I knew.
If my life and the lives of my friends yielded cold comfort in terms of work, we were even more barren in terms of personal satisfaction. If we were married (I was divorced), we were unhappily married. Man and wife joined together in the hope and trust that their lives would be close facsimiles of the lives of the beautiful people, only with more satisfaction. Picture the lives of Marilyn Monroe and a young Howard Hughes melded together in glamorous fusion, and that was what we thought our lives would be.
Instead, we all stared at the ceiling trying to imagine how we might possibly pay our debts to our hopes. We lived in small, drab apartments along with the other uninspired failures of the world. We went to parties where Gallo was served in plastic cups. We thought we might be the inheritors of the fine trophies of life, but instead, we found ourselves mired in frustration at seeing those trophies recede day by day. Like all human beings, we took out that frustration on our spouses. In desperate furtive affairs, we tried to convince ourselves that there was some merit in us, something worthy of redemption if only through the flesh. Of course, it never worked.
Once you’re trapped in the cell of the Humiliation Penitentiary, one or two conjugal visits or even extra conjugal visits do not set you free.
If we weren’t married, our lives were alternately filled and emptied via desperate gropings with partners just as forlorn and angry as we were. We dated within our set—the huge mass of men and women who’d done what we were told, only to have incontrovertible evidence of life’s futility thrown in our faces. We were a miserable group. We could hardly bring comfort to one another, as we experienced none of it ourselves. Far from being “swinging singles,” we were “brooding singles” or “moping singles.”
So there I was on that August day in room 710 of the old Star building, wishing I were dead. And there were millions, tens of millions, of others in my exact situation—trapped without hope, without joy, trembling in the certain knowledge of our failure.
Of course, I had to acknowledge that there were men and women in the world who were happy. These were the precious few who were getting just the opportunities and pleasures out of life that they wanted. While we stood in line at the Burger King of life, some people were royally waited upon and served at the “21” Club of life’s possibilities. At the same moments that we measured our unhappiness in tanker truckloads, others calculated their present and future accomplishments by the supertanker.
I saw them in the offices of the powerful and the rich and the fulfilled. I was the beggar with his face pressed up against the glass window, while the diners inside made merry. When I passed by the White House or by an elegant office emptying of cheerful, bustling men and women, I felt a tangible longing, as if I’d been separated from my birthright. I looked in glossy magazines and saw the pretty people frolicking in Malibu, raking in money and creative fulfillment. On the television news, I watched the movers and shakers press forward in their conquest of life’s goodies. I sank further and further into oblivion.
It hurt. In fact, on that August day in 1973, it hurt so much that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was a prisoner on death row who had nothing to lose by trying to break out. I was determined to tear up the road map that had been given to me and start to find new bearings. I knew that the whole program I’d followed and that had been charted for me for the rest of my life could and must be thrown into the trash heap. I promised myself that I would either discover the route to fulfillment or die trying. No amount of effort, no amount of humiliation in the attempt, could be more punishing than what I was going through each and every day. I had to get off the floor and start achieving something worthwhile.
Since that time, I’ve studied the ways of the successful virtually every waking moment—and some sleeping ones, too. Through persistence, I elevated myself into arenas where the successful played and challenged one another. At the White House, I encountered accomplished, confident people who believed that the world was their oyster. I watched their habits and methods. I asked them questions about how they’d moved from square one to the positions of influence and optimism they now held. Why, I asked myself, were these people—objectively no smarter than my friends or I—so far ahead on the one-way street of life? What habits and attitudes did the successful cultivate that put them above ground, triumphing every day, while the mass of others and I sweltered in our dark and airless underground failure chambers? How did the power players see the world? What tricks, conscious or unconscious, did they use to get traction in the world while we others slipped in the mud?
Not surprisingly, I discovered that the lives of the cabinet secretaries, the movers and shakers of the press, and the captains of industry who had gone into government service were indeed different from my life, and from the way that life had been preached to me. The distinctions were at first nebulous and blurry, but before long, they became sharper. Those high achievers were on a different railroad line altogether. Those girls and boys who found happiness in their work and in their homes were definitely operating off a set of instructions unlike the ones that had been issued to the rest of us. On the coldest of psychic mornings, when our engines would barely turn over, their motors would always start on the first try.
I also took note of why the failures failed. During that particular White House era—the Nixon White House—there was a perfectly adequate sample of self-destructive, self-sabotaging behavior, as well as successful, self-promoting behavior. And I began to see clearly that the failures were on the same guidance system I’d been on.
When I was rather certain that I could differentiate between the useful and the useless attitudes—those that led up and those that led nowhere—I took the first hesitant, tentative steps toward actually behaving in the ways that seemed to lead somewhere promising.
What a shock! I imitated the behavior of the successful, and it carried me toward success. It was like watching a rodeo performance of bull riding for a year, studying every detail of how the cowboy stayed on the bull, and then climbing aboard the bull and staying on myself. The feeling was exhilarating. The thought suddenly struck me that I wasn’t necessarily destined to be a failure after all. That thought was heavenly.
Later, from the ashes of that same Nixon White House, I regarded the world at large. A moment of decision: Should I take a chance on the new techniques and try to get a decent job, or use the old time-honored methods, which would lead to a secure failure? What a question.
Like a man practicing a swan dive for the first time, I nervously prepared to go for the good things in life, to take the new path. I flung myself off the board, pretending that I knew how it was done. It worked.
Other people believed that I was a successful man. Job offers poured in. There was no chance at all that I would have to return to the old Star building. I had seen the way to fly, and I was flying.
I worked for a time at The Wall Street Journal, where I wrote columns and editorials—about popular culture primarily—but also about politics and economics. I had the chance to see successful men and women in action in many areas. I watched and took note of the billionaire investment bankers. I scrutinized the adored writers and publishers. I examined the senators who knew how to get their agendas through Congress.
As I’d done at the White House, I took careful mental notes on how the successful behaved, discerning what set them apart from the unsuccessful. Just as it was at the White House, there were certain behavior and attitude patterns that were the province of the accomplished. The successful were different from you and me. There was absolutely no doubt about it. The men and women who were destined to be happy and prosperous in every way knew some things that most other people never figured out. They were endowed with the habits of success instead of failure.
In many cases, these habits and attitudes were almost instinctual. They had either been picked up at home, or in such a haphazard way that the successful, had they been asked to explain how they did it, would have had a very difficult time. But by the same token, Babe Ruth probably couldn’t have explained exactly why, as a matter of physiology, he could hit so many home runs. Nevertheless, he could hit them. Just as surely, the people whose examples I was following could triumph where most people failed—at art, at money, at advancement, at power, and at love and family.
Little by little, I started to share with others the knowledge that had worked so well for me. I wrote about it in newspaper and magazine articles, and even discussed it during television interviews.
I was still learning the secrets to success, and I hoped that others would want to learn, too. No one wants to be a failure, so readers and listeners did, in fact, show an interest in what I’d observed and had put into play. My theory was that if a man of reasonable care spent six years observing tennis professionals and reported that they had certain devices and practices that enabled them to ace their opponents nine times out of ten, and that he, a class-C player, had tried those tricks and had been able to ace his opponents eight times out of ten, tennis players would pay attention. Not everyone is a tennis player, but everyone plays at the sport of life. I was able to report how pros at the game did it so much more beautifully than we did, so people listened.
The listeners reported back to me that they found that my proposals worked in an astonishing variety of circumstances. The very rough guidelines that I offered helped people turn failure into success in marriage and in work. They lifted messengers and clerks into executive positions. They turned indolent, fearful retirement years into those marked by creative production and satisfaction.
The system I discovered was not a brainstorm that came to me while I was driving across a bridge, nor did I take it from the reading of psychological texts. The rules and suggestions I noted and used in my own life came from real-life, day-to-day observations of how successful people got that way. I couldn’t claim to know how it was done when I started out. But after endless months of study, I had a pretty good idea. Like an anthropologist codifying the behavior of an exotic tribe, I’d studied the ways of those who’d gotten what they wanted from life. By adhering to their unusual methods, a person could actually become a member of that elegant tribe. So experience taught me.
I decided that in the interest of all those trapped in their own room 710 of the human spirit, and of those whose humanity was constantly being deadened by failure and frustration, I would set down on paper just what those rules were. I would share with anyone who cared to learn just how to get what they wanted out of life.
The attitudes and habits of thought I mention are not complex or mysterious. There’s nothing of the conundrums of the East in these rules. Nor do I claim that one or two of these concepts have never occurred to you before. As a comprehensive plan for achievement of your dreams, however, they’re recorded here for the first time (that I know of). Certainly, in their simplicity and inherent logic, they’re uniquely accessible to most people.
So, for those of you who see your dreams receding, who know you could be more than you are, who take pride in your actions, and who see no reason why you should not have all that you want, here is the way to get it—through what I call … Bunkhouse Logic.
