# 4: SURROUND YOURSELF WITH REALLY “NICE” PEOPLE
If you are serious about striving to become a highly successful victim you must be willing to exploit other people. Yes, this means that you must be willing to take advantage of others. There are many kinds of people you can take advantage of and they are everywhere. People pleasers are one such group that are readily available and, as it happens, these people are particularly easy to exploit. People pleasers are abundant so you will not need to search far to find them. Another name for these people is nice people. They also tend to avoid confrontation and are often too polite to tell you that you are incorrect or being unreasonable.
Their tolerance makes them also extremely useful: too nice to ever challenge or rebut you whenever you are making outlandish comments. These are exactly the sort of people you want to have around you as often as possible. They are, by definition, less likely to press you about your commitment for not taking personal responsibility for your own life.
Their good manners and politeness will provide plenty of room for your budding victimhood skills to develop and advance. Another way of saying this is that there’s a great opportunity to be had by surrounding yourself with nice, tolerant, and conflict-avoidant people. It would, therefore, be foolish to not exploit each and every nice person you possibly can.
By doing so you will create a rich source for practicing and developing your litany of complaints and problems. Get into repeating over and over all the things that are wrong, are going wrong, or will likely go wrong whenever you are in the company of nice people.
I know a professional victim who went quite far in his victimhood development by living a committed life of convincing each and every person he met of his mantra:
“The whole world is out to screw me over.”
He got extremely good at this. Over time it even became a self-fulfilling prophesy. He was able to find plenty of evidence to support this belief. He could and did use anything and everything – like being stuck in traffic, or spilling his coffee, or running out of tooth paste – all as further proof and evidence that he was indeed correct: “The whole world is out to screw me over.”
One small caveat here – and this is extremely important – you must be very careful. Do not go so far overboard as to drive even the kindest, nicest and most tolerant people away. Therefore, you have to find a certain balance here. If you find your friends are spending less time with you, you might need to drop it down a notch or two. You may have to cool your poor-me mantra so that you don’t end up with no one to listen to your rants of negativity.
While there are lots of nice people you don’t want to have to go out and constantly search for more of them when you can use the ones already in your life: at your job, certain family members, and friends and neighbors. In fact you might begin to notice that these loyal and nice people seem drawn into an almost hypnotic spell where they appear to have taken on helping you as though it is their mission. They are, of course, doomed in this regard, but by having them around makes you all set for your own purposes.
If you are on a search for more nice people to exploit look into churches, mosques, and synagogues as they are ripe for finding such people. Take advantage of their Coffee Ands, committees and other smaller gatherings for you to spin your rigorous helplessness and victimization thinking.
As you advance in becoming an effective victim you’ll discover what seems to work best, and you’ll be able to build up your repertoire of poor-me phrases and statements. Be willing to discard any that don’t elicit enough sympathy from those kindly types. All of this is to further develop your learning curve for improving your capacity to become an effective victim.
Next week: #5: GET A MENTOR