Wow, Cracked did it again. Since I’m no longer trying to make it in “the man’s” corporate world (and, instead, hope to make my own corporation, because let’s be real, being a “person” is better than being a person under tax code). Read:

5 Popular Self Help Tips That Actually Hurt Your Career

But instead of reading “hurt your career”, read “never, ever ever finish your book and actually sell it”. But it also says how to avoid never finishing your novel and actually sell it in the opening paragraph. You have to write.

Number five explains all those really “smart” writers who always wins when it comes to scrabbling around for five minutes and reading out what they have written or can write a really witty “gag” story for a reading, but cannot, for the life of them put out a book that might actually launch their career.

Number four is for all those people who imagine being a famous writer must mean a lot of respect and fame and imagines the trappings of life that comes with success and forget all the hard work that went unpaid just to get and stay good enough to get paid.

Number three is the problems with writers group, where telling about the story they are going to write gives them all the buzz they need for creating something and then they never actually sit down and write it, but go on to ruin the next thought they had.

Number two is for all those who want to write to committee and have every bit of their story vetted by “experts” before they continue. Any showing of actual originality is going to be equally loved and hated by their ideal readers and people who are not their ideal readers, and the non-ideal-readers opinions have a 50/50 chance of trumping the opinions of people who would actually buy the unaltered book in question.

And number one is for all those people who think that writing a book is just too hard to actually try themselves, because: tragic reasons. So they critique those who do succeed in finishing their first book, leaning a bit too hard on how bad it is, instead of how good it could be.

So don’t do any of those things. I’ve done them all, at one point. None of them are really bad things, but they can hurt worse than they can help sometimes. I’ve recognized me doing all these things, especially #1. You just have to realize you are doing them and just stop doing them.