AS I write this, I’m at the Sunstar CDO office, helping a friend out with getting her writing published right here in this very paper. While I believe you’ll be hearing from her very soon, I won’t say who she is; after all, she herself didn’t tell her friends about this piece of very good news.
“You don’t want to jinx it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
Good call.
At this point in my life I’m not really sure whether to label myself superstitious or not. It’s one thing to pare away all the silly beliefs I used to have, like going blind if you go to sleep with your hair still wet or getting appendicitis whenever you go for a run or some other vigorous sport or exercise immediately after eating. It’s also another thing to see that there are just some coincidences and other occurrences that don’t make sense at all but happen anyway, like improving my mood for a few days and then suddenly being forgiven and on very good terms with a dear friend who I thought I had estranged a long time ago.
Jinxing your plans by telling other people about them – yes, even your most trusted friends and allies – most definitely belongs to the latter in my opinion. There’s just no way to explain it, so people come up with things like “the wind might blow it away” or “man proposes, but God disposes.” I should know, I’ve been guilty of dooming my best intentions by exposing them to the world one too many times.
But there’s an even bigger offender of this unwritten rule that I know of, much guiltier than me or anyone I’ve met – and it’s safe for me to assume that yes, you even though we’ve never met in person. This person’s first name is Sebastian, and I won’t give out his last name because I still admire and respect him as a writer and an expert in his field; but if you’re curious, you can give Google a try and find out who he is, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Sebastian is a self-described expert in the field of human efficiency, a self-proclaimed master of cutting out all the worthless nonsense in one’s life until the things that truly matter are all that remain, thus clearing the path to your inevitable victory in life.
According to Sebastian, it all begins with sitting down with a pen and a notebook in a café and jotting down everything that comes to mind without self-censorship until you find your reason for being, the one reason that would make you wake up mornings feeling alive, alert, awake, and enthusiastic. Or in the words of the late Pedro Arrupe, SJ: “What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.”
It is for things like these that I look up to Sebastian. Unfortunately for him, however, to say that he is overconfident would be a gross understatement. On his blog and in his book on finding your raison d'être, he lays out his innermost plans for the whole world to see: to retire young with $40 million in the bank, to start a globally powerful dynasty of magnates a la the Rothschilds, and join the likes of Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, and others as among the greatest and most powerful men who ever lived. And mind you, this book of his which I’m referring to was published almost 10 years ago, and during that time he tried to gain some free publicity for himself by picking fights with airline companies and others over the most trivial of matters.
What’s he like now? I’m not sure he’s gotten close to any of the goals he listed in his book but on his blog it appears that he runs a coaching company that helps employers encourage their workers to pull no stops when it comes to increasing productivity – or in other words, work more.
If this erstwhile future head of a global empire has been reduced to encouraging workaholism to squeeze as much economic value out of hapless employees who unfortunately don’t know better, then I have to conclude that he jinxed himself very hard out of his grand vision. Hence my advice to you is this: keep your head down, and don’t jinx it!