Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s infamous manager, claimed that the key to a successful snow job was to find the mark’s guilty pleasure. With Elvis, it was the feelings and emotions that the young girls were feeling as they watched Elvis gyrate. They were having thoughts that they were not sure that they should have. Parker capitalized on that, as any good carny barker would have done.
So you want to live the simple life? Possibly, you already understand your guilty pleasure in the concept: You will not be leading a life of denial, at all. You will be embracing the feelings and pleasures that you are not sure you should have. It is the simple life’s dirty little secret. You simply will be grasping the things that are most important to you, but that you thought you could never afford.
Ironically, you also will be doing so by needing less.
While every one of Elvis’s female fans may have been aroused by the same sinful imaginings, your guilty pleasures almost certainly will be unique to you. That will not lessen the level of arousal.
And the idea of simple living as a way to live a richer life is no snow job.
I have been living a simple life since I was twenty-four. I didn’t know it at the outset. I merely decided that money was not going to control me. Since then, I have started a multi-million dollar business, then sold it for almost nothing, because the money was beginning to control my life.
When my marriage failed, rather than engage in an acrimonious court battle over possessions, I simply gave everything to my ex. It didn’t make the lawyers, eager for a payday, very happy. It didn’t make my ex very happy, because she saw that I was happy, and she did not like that. But it did make me happy. No stress, no mess.
I planned, built and found funding for a five-million-dollar seniors housing complex while I lived in a small cabin in the bush, with no water supply and no electricity.
I recovered many tens of millions of dollars for my clients but charged them less than $300,000 over a ten-year span.
I have contributed over $100,000 to charities that I found to be worthwhile and put on a seasonal charity event for needy families, when my income dropped (due to a serious injury) to less than $12,000 in the year. The event cost $14,500, and it was worth every penny.
Now, in my seventies, I enjoy great health, because I chose a lifestyle that eliminated unnecessary stress, eschewed greed of any sort and encompassed the idea that money is not the solution to happiness: it is the problem.
I almost feel guilty that I have so much, while others struggle every day to find happiness. They don’t know the key to a successful snow job. And the mark is not another human being: it is the misconception that we need more and more to be happy. The truth is that we need less and less.
Simple does not mean static. Your guilty pleasure likely will change as you age. What is most important to a 20-year-old likely is not the same as a forty-year-old or a sixty-year-old.
Family focus may change, the experiences you embrace will evolve.
I began my journey in the simple life focused on the skills that I had as an investigator, solving my client’s problems. There was gratification and joy in playing this human chess game.
Then, I began to develop a reputation for helping solve legal problems and negotiate settlements for beleaguered single parents, even though I was no lawyer. I helped my clients win, every time, and I charged them nothing.
Soon, I found that I had a reputation for understanding people and, with my background in charity work, political candidates with a just cause and local non-profits called on me to do their public relations and media work. Again, for free, because money would have demeaned the effort.
Next, I discovered a passion for travel and for environmental activism (they are not incompatible).
With each new chapter in my life, I immersed myself in doing the best that I possibly could.
Because I had focus and had rejected the material component of life, I was able to provide excellent service to those who asked for my assistance.
My life was simple, but incredibly rich.
Do not expect that you will fall, naturally, into the simple life. Like the young girls thinking erotic thoughts at an Elvis concert, you may not understand, at all, what you really are feeling and wanting, but the more you explore, the more you will know.
In the quiet darkness of their bedrooms, I expect that every young female eventually understood. As you will.