If You Want To Be Successful, Listen To the Doctor. Dr Seuss. Four Seussisms for Success

Paul B. Brown, Forbes Contributor

Here’s more than you need to know about me. I took a lot of acting courses in college.

And I was, to be kind, truly, truly awful.  That isn’t false humility, unfortunately. It is just a fact. The desire was there. But, unfortunately, not the talent.

However, it wasn’t a total loss.  One of the things you constantly have to do for acting class is come up with new material to do.  And totally by accident I found myself performing Dr. Seuss whenever I needed a good grade.  The writing is wonderful. He is fairly easy to memorize and if I got the audience laughing they had a tendency to forget that I wasn’t very good as an actor.

One of the many intriguing things about Dr. Seuss, nee Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), is that he wrote, in different ways, about how to be successful.

Here are four of my favorites. 

1.  You have brains in your head

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

–Oh, the Places You’ll Go

2.  You have to be Smart

You have to be smart

and keep watching their feet.

Because sometimes they stand

on their tiptoes and cheat.

–Happy Birthday to You

3.  I was following a Nowhere Hunch

I was following a Nowhere Hunch, a real dumb thing to do!

Everybody sometimes does it.

Even me. Even you.

Oh, you get so many hunches

that you don’t know ever quite

if the right hunch is the wrong hunch

Then the wrong hunch might be right.

–Hunches in Bunches

 4.  The Places I Hiked to

The places I hiked to!

The roads that I rambled to find the best eggs that have ever been scrambled!

If you want to get eggs you can’t buy at a store,

You have to do things never thought of before.

–Scrambled Eggs Super!

 It seems only fitting that I give Dr. Seuss the last word.

“There are so many things that you really should know

And that’s why I’m bothering telling you so.”

–Oh Say Can You Say