That is the question we should be asking ourselves regularly, advises Mike Cernovich:
Luck rules our lives, although we can increase our odds of winning – of getting lucky – by taking more spins of the wheel. Thus you must stay busy.
Your life is the sum total of your activities and the people in your life. Be useful to other people. Find ways to meet market demands. Be good to your friends. When is the last time you emailed a friend to say, “How can I help you?”
People are doing poorly at being useful as they believe simply being around a person adds value to their lives. Yet many people are vampires.
Too many people are out for themselves, trying to extract as much value from others as they can.
That’s one way to live, but it doesn’t work for me.
I find ways to be useful to other people, and it works for me.
Instead of wondering why people don’t reach out to you or old friends fall away, why not stop working angles on people, being a manipulator, and simply saying, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Too many of us practice a warped secular churchianity, where we congratulate ourselves for donating a modicum of money here and there to savages we don’t know in lieu of helping our friends and allies.
But you’re not a better person for helping the stranger and ignoring your neighbor. You’re a worse person, you’re a performance artist. As Jesus himself said, even the tax collectors love those who love them and even the pagans greet their own people.
Now what does it say about you if your own behavior doesn’t even rise to their level?
Just as only the strong can turn the other cheek, only those who help their own first can help others.
This is not a criticism; the readers of Vox Popoli are well-known across the Internet for their strength of support. You not only support me, but you support my allies and you support each other. But it is a reminder, to me, if no one else, that instead of waiting for others to ask if they need our help, we should proactively go to our friends and ask if there is anything we can do.
In that vein, I know there are a number of people here who would very much like to attend the Dev Game course, but cannot afford to do so. Perhaps you lost your job. Perhaps your kids need braces. Perhaps you’re a young man who probably shouldn’t be reading here in the first place, but wants to get into game development.
So, in the interest of following Mike’s lead, I’d like to offer seven free course passes to readers who would have signed up for Dev Game if they’d had the ability to do so. Write me an email today with DG in the subject and a one-paragraph description of what you’d like to do in the game industry; I will select the seven I believe will most benefit from the course and send them registration links.
And be sure you can actually attend on Saturdays before emailing me.
UPDATE: A donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has made 10 additional seats available for those who cannot afford it. So, if you would like to utilize one of those seats, let me know.