The Viable Alternative

Originally uploaded by Mauricio Sanchesco


From the time I discovered the idea of “self appointment”, one of the four pillars of The Viable Alternative, when I was just 20 years old, I took it to mean one thing: that you don’t need others to give you permission to do what you want to do, be what you want to be or have what you want to have. Rather, YOU CAN GIVE THAT PERMISSION TO YOURSELF.

Whew! What I sigh of relief!

Held in bondage

You see, right from childhood, I always wanted to fit in, I always wanted to be accepted, and to achieve all these lofty goals, I felt I had to have other people’s approval in order for me to have ANYTHING worthwhile in life, including a positive self image.

During my elementary and middle schools years at private school, I was called a nerd and a loser, and was expected to dress and act a certain way. If I wore anything or did anything that seemed “cool”, or if I tried to assert myself in any way, I was immediately smacked down and told to stop trying to act “cool,” that it wasn’t working.

It kind of reminded me of the stories you read of what ethnic minorities went through during the pre-Civil Rights Era in America (and in many other countries).

In some areas, when they would try to rise above a certain level of society that was designated for them, their lives were threatened, laws were passed, or whatever they were using to help them uplift themselves was taken away or destroyed all in order to keep them in their “place”.

Truth be told, that’s how I felt, especially when I started hitting puberty.

Now I would look at all the “popular kids”, and noticed how they got invited to all the parties, they had all the friends, girls would have crushes on them, and they were looked upon as cool.

I thought to myself, if only I could be “accepted”, I could have those things as well. All I needed was their permission, and I could be cool as well!

So, I sought their acceptance the only way I knew how:
• By following them around whether they liked it or not (and no, they didn’t like it)
• By being overly supplicating and “nice.”
• By laughing at their jokes whether they were funny or not.
• By being seen but not heard.
• By putting up with their verbal abuse, afraid that if I tried to defend myself, they would get angry and never accept me into their circle. (My goodness).

Without the aid of any drugs like crack, I somehow convinced myself that this “master” plan would catapult me into the cool, popular circle, which in turn would grant me the permission I needed to receive what I thought were the finer things in life.

If you have even an ounce more insight than I did, you would see that this never worked. I only got more abuse, was called a loser more and more, and told to go away, that I was unwanted, and not welcome. I was told to hang out with the other losers where I belonged (lol).

Also, if I got one compliment, or someone “cool” was being nice to me, it would totally make my day, because it looked like I was finally getting their permission to be cool. Yet, if I got one insult, it would ruin the rest of my day, because my goal then looked more difficult to achieve.

It was truly a MISERABLE existence, and when I left private school, I came to develop a passionate HATE of private school and all the people that I had gone to school with, a hate that I carried with me into my late teens.

I felt that hating them and wishing death upon all of them was adequate revenge.

What I probably hated more than them was myself for allowing myself to be treated and abused in such a way. In my mid to late teens when I felt a bit more accepted, I frequently looked back in shame, anger and embarrassment at my previous servile condition which haunted me.

I felt like a former slave, looking back and despising his former condition of bondage, and wondering why he allowed himself to be in that condition in the first place.

The Curse of Puberty

To make matters worse, at the tender age of 12, I started to develop what would become by the time I was 15, severe cystic acne (not too far away from the person you see in the pic above). With that came the taunts from girls and guys alike of being called “ugly,” “pizza face” (hahahaha….pizza face) and the like.

Well, you can guess that at a time when guys my age became attracted to the opposite sex, starting right when I got into high school, I was also becoming attracted to the belief that I was ugly.

Girls who had any semblance of physical attractiveness seemed to give all the attention to the guys who were good-looking, and I didn’t see myself as one of them.

As such, it was fine for me to find a girl attractive and admire her from afar, but God forbid I would ever have the gall to think I had a chance with any of these girls. I felt I didn’t have the right to think that way. To me, the attractive girls were the reserve of the good-looking, cool guys, so I just stayed in my “place.”

It wasn’t only that I saw these girls as out of my league, but worse was that I felt that I didn’t have the permission of the “cooler”, more “beautiful” people to think I had a chance with these girls.

To me, to get the girls, to be cool and to be popular, you had to have the approval of the right people. What scared me half to death was the thought of being told that a girl that I wanted to try to talk to was out of my league and then subsequently being ridiculed and laughed at.

To avoid the potential embarrassment and subsequent depression, I didn’t bother even trying at all.

My absolutely fragile ego could only take so much abuse.

The thing was, it didn’t extend to only girls, it also extended to the clothes I wore. I liked dressing nice but I sometimes I feared wearing certain clothes because people might just tell me that I wasn’t cool enough to wear them.

What’s interesting is that even after my acne cleared (almost miraculously) by the time I was sixteen, and I started to lose the physical awkwardness that comes along with puberty, and have what could be considered “cooler” friends, the scars still remained.

I still was haunted by the labels that were placed on me that ate away at my self esteem and I still was driven by behaviours that I adopted to compensate for these labels.

There was a world of things that I wanted from tangible things like girls to the intangibles like self-confidence, the ability to hold my head up high, the ability to feel good about myself, the ability to express myself, etc, that I felt was closed off from me because I didn’t have the permission to attain them.

Once again, I felt it was in the hands of others to give me.

I even tried to openly put myself down and call myself horrible things like “ugly,” or a “loser” in front of others in hopes that they will correct me and tell me things that I wanted, or rather, needed to hear. Things that I wanted to believe in myself but wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t.

Needless to say, for just about all my high school years, that boost I so desperately wanted from others never came.

Things Fall Apart

As I started to see that I wasn’t getting the approval that I felt that I needed to attain the things I wanted, at the very end of my high school years and into the first two years of college I began to grow very, very bitter, and in between (and sometimes during) my bitterness I began to go through a lot of depression.

I felt as if I were a victim of the world, a person who was on the outside looking into a world that he desired to enter but was kept back by the world at large.

I had a “me against the world” mentality, where based on evidence from my past, there were things I wanted but the world didn’t want me to have because it wanted to keep me down and for me to not get ahead.

I saw my life as one big injustice that was directed towards me, and I became a person who was full of hate, anger, bitterness and resentment (more on this all on another blog in the near future).

I began to start “predicting” things that would go wrong in my life and lo and behold, they would subsequently go wrong. This was clear proof that not only mankind wanted me to fail, but the “gods” wanted me to fail as well.

I soon just started to see myself as a person who just had“bad luck.”

The Great Depression

As things continued to go wrong, and the “conspiracy” against me continued to play out, towards the second half of my sophomore year in college, I began to slide into a deeper and deeper depression where I stopped caring about anything, or anyone, including myself. I began to sleep all day and stopped going to class.

Some days, when I would muster the strength to climb out of bed and walk to class, I would stop in the middle of the street and think to myself, “What’s the point?” and turn around and go back home and go to sleep.

I figured if the world and the invisible powers that be insisted on pissing on me, I was no longer going to allow myself to be their “fool,” so in response I was going to just lay there (literally) and do nothing.

As time passed, I continued to feel sorry for myself and spiral deeper into depression. I began to ask myself if it was just better to end my life, because I wasn’t going to get anything out of it anyways. I even thought about the method with which I was going to end my life (don’t worry, I’ll spare you the details).

Feeling so painfully miserable, I began to set dates of when I was going to do the “final deed” if things in my life didn’t improve. Truly, something had to give, because the pain I felt hurt so bad and I couldn’t live with it anymore.

This, I felt was going to be my big defiant act to the world to show it that I wasn’t going to fit into the “role” it had for me.

Well, fortunately, doomsday never came, and at the suggestion of my mother, I started to see a therapist on campus.

I went to the therapist thinking that there was something wrong with me, and that I was clinically depressed. I went hoping that he would subscribe to me something that would “make it all go away.”

The therapist, after hearing several sessions of my travails, woes and sorrows, laughed off my claims of clinical depression, saying that there was really nothing wrong with me. He said what I was experiencing was just the symptoms of adolescence.

He nonetheless went ahead and prescribed me some depression medication, but assured me really that there was nothing clinically wrong with me and was just experiencing “growing pains.”

“The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”

Well, lo and behold, after I started taking the meds, I actually started to feel better.

It also helped that the school year was winding down, the weather was getting warmer, and though my grades were totally utterly pathetic, I was looking forward to going back to New York and seeing my friends and family.

I took the meds for about a month, discontinuing them for good shortly after I returned home, and when I realized that my depression wasn’t going to come back.

It was after this that something remarkable slowly started to happen.

I slowly started to change my attitude towards life for the better.

First off, I realized that I went through probably the worst depression of my entire life where I seriously contemplated ending my life, and…..I came out on the other side alive and unscathed.

I felt I was stronger and wiser for having been through something “major” and actually surviving it.

Because of this, I decided that I was no longer going to be a prisoner of my past. Rather, I resolved to learn from it and move on.

What’s more, I started to look at the people around me who had the things I wanted, from confidence, to a great sense of style, to money, to success with the ladies, which aren’t what you would exactly think of as “deep”, except maybe for confidence, and this time, rather than look at these things as the exclusive reserve of the privileged few, I started to wonder what these things would look like on me.

I noticed that there was something unique about everyone in the way they individually expressed the things I wanted, with each person having his own style.

I realized that me being a unique individual just like everyone else, my desires would appear differently than those that had what I wanted.

Rather than get depressed about my individuality, I actually started to get inspired. The fuel of the inspiration was that I was curious as to how my own “greatness” would manifest in contrast to the others I had admired.

The shrink that I had seen in school was right, there wasn’t really anything wrong with me. The meds seemed to be more like a placebo to help me see that really, I didn’t need anything outside of myself to be happy. All I needed was a change of attitude.

Appoint Thine Own Self

Originally uploaded by shaman.

My inspiration and desire reached a point that I no longer wanted to sit and wonder anymore what my greatness was going to look like. I also saw that no one was going to give me the “right” to go and attain these things.

I became so inspired that I decided screw everyone else, I was going to give myself the permission to attain the things I desired.

I didn’t realize it them, but this was the beginning of The Viable Alternative, where one steps out of The Illusion, and begins to erect the pillars which leads to one allowing his own individual greatness to be expressed through him on all levels.

Now granted, I truly, at the age of 20, had little idea of what self confidence was REALLY about, or any idea of really what one’s TRUE self was, and I wouldn’t find out for YEARS. At this time in my life, I thought that the “self” involved how one expressed himself “appearance wise”, from fashion, to style, to his physical looks.

I had no idea there was a deeper dimension to this and me not knowing this would bite me in the a** later on, hence the reason for part 2 of this blog, to explain the consequences of that.

But hey, give me a break, re-read the preceding paragraphs and look at where the hell I came from. However flawed my “model”, this was my first attempt at looking to my own self to gain self-esteem and stop being a victim.

This was a step in the right direction where I realized that one could appoint his own self to greatness rather than wait for someone else to do it for him. I realized that everything I wanted in life was mine for the taking because I said so, regardless of anyone else’s opinion.

As a result, I was able to let go of the hate I had towards my former “captors,” (more on this on another blog). Since I no longer saw them as holding me back, I no longer saw myself as a victim, because I put the power of my destiny in my own hands.

As a matter of fact, .without all the hate and the anger (well, okay, there might have been some left), I saw this new self discovery as my true, big “Eff you” to those in my past who told me I was nothing and to the world at large (the Illusion) which tries to tell people who and what they could aspire to.

I decided that I was no longer going to consciously support that nonsense.

Rather, I took some words my mom told me in my toughest times and decided to live by them, that I was “the best and deserved the best.”

Since I now started to see myself as deserving the best, rather than expect the worst like I did in my “previous life,” where I ultimately got what I expected, I decided that I was going to do the exact opposite and expect the best as well.

What do you think happened when I did this?

Well, I started to get all these “lucky” breaks in my life. I’d get all sorts of discounts in stores without even asking for them. I would get in places for free that were charging, opportunities began to fall into my life, people would automatically like me upon meeting me, and my dating life transformed.

In fact, a year after my “great depression,” I looked back at what I had gone through couldn’t believe it was the same person.

Truly, to this day, I see that great depression that I had gone through as one of the best things that happened to me. It helped transform my life at the time. It also taught me how important a role attitude plays in the quality of one’s life.

It’s funny when I hear people talk about the Law of Attraction and how they first learned it in the movie, “The Secret,” because I discovered it years before it came out without even reading about it in a book or hearing about it on television.

I learned from the School of Hard Knocks, that you if you expect the best, you’ll expect the best.

The Spotlight is Now on YOU

Okay, ‘nuff about me, how about you?

I’m sure that there are people that you admire. You may admire them for the things that they have, the things that they have accomplished, or the things that they’re able to do. These people touch, move or inspire you in some way or another.

My question to you is, have you ever thought to yourself that there are great things you can do or accomplish that are unique to you?

Have you ever realized that the things that the people you admire have that you can have them too, but tailored to your own specific tastes?

You don’t have to sit in longing, jealousy, anger, or sadness wishing that you had what certain people have, or could do what certain people could do, or be what certain people could be, thinking that all these things are closed off to you.

I lived that way for years, and look how “happy” I was.

I was the perfect, miserable bastard for it.

The Illusion tells you that you have to fit a certain standard to acquire the things you want, and if not, you’re sh*t out of luck. It will then dictate to you the things that you’re “allowed” to aspire to or settle for.

I say b.s., get up now, tell The Illusion and those who perpetuate it to kiss your a**, and give yourself the permission to go and get these things for yourself.

Appoint yourself as having the COMPLETE and UNADULTERATED right to attain the exact things you want for your life.

Most people lives of quiet desperation because:
1. They’re waiting for someone else to give them the right to go and get what they want.
2. They’re not even aware of the fact that the power is within their own hands to appoint themselves the right to be successful.

I was waiting for YEARS for someone to give me the permission to acquire the life I wanted not only because I wasn’t aware that I had the power to do so myself, but also, I wasn’t aware of my own unique greatness. I was too busy envying the “greatness” of others and putting myself down for not being great like them.

The reason why you admire certain people is because what they’re able to do, be or have touches, moves and inspires you in some way. To this I pose to you this question: why not be touched moved and inspired by YOURSELF and your possibilities?

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with having some figure you admire, whether it is a public or a private figure IF this person inspires you to bring out your own unique greatness. However, I believe it becomes unhealthy when you put this person on a pedestal and live vicariously through this person, thinking that they’re better than you.

Next time you’re watching TV, the constant perpetuator of The Illusion, and you see some show that is glorifying the fabulous lifestyle of your favourite celebrity, rather than drool or turn as green as a Christmas tree with envy, see yourself as worthy of the same exact lifestyle. Ask yourself how you would cater such a lifestyle to your own specific tastes.

Then, decide which aspect of your unique greatness you’re going to give to go get it.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Next time you see a story on TV or read in a magazine about an inspiring success story, rather than get depressed and call yourself a loser, decide what type of success you want to create that would touch move and inspire you, and give yourself the permission to go get it!

Next time you see someone walking down the street with an attractive man or woman, don’t start hating on the person or yourself, tell yourself you’re going to attract the same thing that’s compatible with you because you have a, b and c.

Again, this is The Viable Alternative.

All the great movements in the history of humankind was started because a person or a group of people decided that they weren’t going to let their oppressors dictate to them how they were going to live, They instead, decided what they wanted and gave themselves the permission to go and get it.

You can see these examples in the American Revolution, to the most successful slave revolt in history that took place in Haiti, to the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

What is it that you desire that you don’t consciously or unconsciously think you’re worthy of?

Whatever that is, the only person that needs to tell you that you’re worthy of it is YOU.

You may be thinking that you have to become this or that BEFORE you appoint yourself to success, but I say, “You’re as good as it gets.” This may depress you because you may think that you have to become more like this or that person, but actually, realizing that I was as good as it gets was one of the most freeing revelations.

Who you are, in all your individuality and uniqueness, is already worthy of greatness. You’re not going to physically transform into something new like the Incredible Hulk, so rather, accept the very fact that greatness is meant to be expressed and lived as you are right now within your own skin. You as yourself are worthy of it right now.

When I was able to do this, I was able to see myself acquiring better things in life and receive them.

The Illusion

What irritates me to no end is how people worship celebrities, public figures and other people they admire while being totally oblivious to the UNIQUE greatness that lies within them.

They live in this world, The Illusion, where they see this un-navigable chasm that stands between them and the “great ones” who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

If people are able to see their own unique greatness, they’ll get so inspired that they’ll throw aside the shackles of mediocrity and appoint themselves the right to navigate across that chasm that will bring them into the land of the “great ones.”

If they can’t navigate across the chasm, they’ll construct a bridge, and if they can’t construct a bridge, they’ll create greatness right where they stand.

Such is the way of The Viable Alternative where when one appoints himself to greatness, he won’t let anyone or anything stand in the way of the subsequent path he has to take.

Self-Appointment in a wider context

As I wrap this up, bear with me for just a few more minutes as I share with you some thoughts.

It interests me how I hear many ethnic minorities not only in America but around the world explain that their inferior statistics compared to the ruling majority is due to the fact of them being “kept down” all these years.

Now, historically, it may be argued that most of these groups may have a good point considering the violent injustices they’ve experienced for generations under their oppressors, (I’m sure you’re noticing how I’m conspicuously avoiding naming names because my intent is not to have a political or ethnic debate here), and also the policies that were carried out explicitly for that purpose.

It may even be argued that some of the policies in place now aren’t fair and don’t help their situation and that those in power may or may not be doing enough to help those who have been socially and economically disadvantaged for generations to “catch up” or get ahead.

However, I’ve often asked myself, what would happen if those who don’t like their position said “Screw the government, I’m going to find my own way ‘by hook or by crook.’”

What if more people said, “The government should be doing more but I’m not going to wait around for them, I appoint my own self to go and get what I want?”

I’m in no way pointing fingers, but I believe if more people accepted the fact that the government may not step in where they believe they should, right or wrong that may be, and said that they’ll find their own way, I believe the demographics of many groups around the world would change.

Hey, many slaves in the past knew their masters weren’t going to free them, so they took their freedom into their own hands and made a run for it.

I look at all the underdeveloped countries like Haiti and the ones in Africa where their governments greedily refuse to implement policies to develop their nations the way those did in Asia, Europe and America.

These governments refuse to provide steady electricity, they refuse to provide a solid infrastructure, they refuse to pass laws encouraging entrepreneurialism and investments and they just flat out refuse to make themselves useful in any way to foster growth in their countries.

As messed up as this is, what if the citizens of these countries decided to stop complaining, accepted that their governments are not only NOT helping matters, but that they may NEVER help, and banded together to provide these things for themselves on a macro level?

I don’t think a model for this has ever been used by developing nations on national level, but perhaps this may be THE Viable Alternative to the models of the Western World, Asia, and China?

Hey, just some thoughts…..

Parting Words

Thanks for reading.

However, I have a confession to make: this definitely is not where my journey of “self-appointment” ended. There were more PAINFUL lessons about self appointment that I was yet to learn as I would later find out.

Stay tuned for Part II of this blog where I share with you this very important and often overlooked lesson.