To succeed in sales, you need skills—not skills entirely consistent with moral integrity and emotional well-being, but skills nevertheless.
Max BarryI don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense.
Max BarryOf course the Curies died. They identified ionizing radiation while bathing in it. There were risks involved in being your own guinea pig. But there was a long tradition of scientists doing just that: of paying for the expansion of human knowledge with their lives. I didn't deserve to be categorized with them, because honestly, I wasn't interested in the greater good. I just wanted to make myself better legs. I didn't mind other people benefiting in some long-term indirect way but it wasn't what motivated me. I felt guilty about this for a while. Every time a lab assistant looked at me with starstruck eyes, I felt I should confess: Look, I'm not being heroic. I'm just interested in seeing what I can do. Then it occured to me that maybe they all felt this way. All these great scientists who risked their themselves to bring light to darkness, maybe they weren't especially altruistic either. Maybe they were like me, seeing what they could do.
Max BarryI read once that you need two things to be happy. Any two of health, money and love. You can cover the absence of one with the other two. I drew comfort from this idea while I was fully bodied, employed, and unloved. It made me feel I wasn't missing much. But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all. I had a girl in a hospital bed who liked me and I didn't know where that might go but I could tell it was more important than low blood pressure. It mattered more than a new car. With Lola in the same building, I walked with a spring in my step. That was true literally. But I mean I was happy, happy on an axis I had previously known about only in theory. I was glad to be alive.
Max BarryEveryone's broken, one way or another.
Max BarryIt was funny how as soon as you knew there was something better, what you had seemed unbearable.
Max BarryWith Lola, everything was solvable. She was my independent variable.
Max BarryI hadn't known this about love: that you did not need to deserve it. I thought there was a set of criteria, like a good sense of humor and looks and wealth. You could compensate deficiencies in one area with excellence in another, hence rich, ugly men with beautiful wives. But there was an algorithm involved. That was why I thought I was unloved: I didn't score highly enough. I had made some attempts to improve my score and also told myself I didn't care because that was what women wanted, something fake and temporary, I would rather be alone. And sometimes I was just lazy and would rather code things. But here I was soaking in a bath of my own filth with Lola scrubbing my shoulders, and what algorithm could explain that? That problem was nonhalting.
Max BarryTag: love
I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn't be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola's heart beat fastest for me.
Max BarryThe most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.
Max BarryTag: desire persuasion
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