It's time you acquiesce to the brutish bully of all facts: You are not a winner. Winners don't read self-help tracts, such as this one (as insightful as it is); they're too busy winning. Millions of self-help books are purchased every year, resulting in the suspicious lack of millions of additional winners.
Accept your unique cocktail of inferior genomes you have inherited from your parents and ancestors, combined with the blunt yet subtle determinism that the current economic and social culture has forced upon you: Someone outside your purview has rigged the game so that you won't win. "No one wins unless everyone wins," Bruce Springsteen declared, but that's mere populist doggerel to comfort the loser, to suggest that a tide is coming that will lift their hole-ridden dinghies when, in fact, all that tide will do is sink those vessels. When, in the history of sport, has there ever been a winner without a corresponding loser? Never, that's when. You can play and play and play this game to which you've never been made privy to the rules, but you're never going to win.
Because you are - and say it with me - a Loser. There, that wasn't so hard, was it? Perhaps a little freeing, a little exhilarating, in a way? As with the addict who finally confesses his demons, wasn't just a little bit of your burden lifted from your stooped shoulders? Oh, come on, admit it. Your weak protestations just prove my point.
You're soft. You're undemonstrative. You're unimaginative. You're uninspired. You're weak. That's why you're un- or underemployed, a Tea-bagger or a Democratic member of Congress.
But here's the dynamic secret that Loserdom, for some reason, conceals, and it's somewhat curious that it remains a secret, as it was the overriding theme in the immortal Bill Murray vehicle "Meatballs" (and served as the guiding philosophy of filmmakers of virtually every movie starring "Saturday Night Live" alumni): It Just Doesn't Matter. Even if you give 20% more, even if you give it your all, you are doomed to the ignominy of being long forgotten soon after your demise, if not well before.
So the sooner you embrace your Loserdom, the easier (or nominally less miserable) your life will be. No longer will you anguish over the fact that some Type-A with hustle and drive won a job or a sexual partner you had aspired to win but lacked merely the wherewithal, talent and charm to do so. Now, you'll be able to lounge, slack-jawed, before your television mid-afternoon, a bib of potato-chip crumbs littering your expanding, corpulent gut, and watch Ellen DeGeneres' incongruous (in your world, at least) happy dance without asking yourself, "What the fuck is wrong with me?"
There is power in accepting failure into your life. The sooner you embrace this truism, the more your mediocrity will become a positive for society, because at least you won't be unraveling the fabric of our culture as virulently as, oh, say, Glenn Beck or those Goldman Sachs dicks are, under the guise of "winning." Coddle your Inner Loser, swaddle and comfort it, because God knows no one else will.