By Orlando Spikes — 12 Jul 2025

Requires Assembly: The Quiet Bullshit Behind Success Stories

I was already deep in thought about the way we’re sold half-truths when I saw a meme that stopped me cold. It was a photo of a shattered glass door lying in thousands of pieces on the floor. The caption read:

“I’m selling this glass door. Just needs to be assembled.”

It made me laugh. Then it made me uncomfortable. Because it perfectly illustrated the central problem I’d been circling:

We live in a world where bullshit thrives. Not outright lies—but claims that are technically true, yet intentionally misleading.

And we accept it. In fact, we expect it.

We hear it in marketing. We see it in self-help content. We repeat it in the way we talk about success, motivation, even hardship. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if something sounds good and isn't technically false, it doesn’t really matter how much it misleads. That’s just "branding." That’s just "positioning."

1. Bullshit Isn’t a Lie—It’s a Strategy

In his famous essay On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt draws a sharp line: a liar knows the truth and seeks to hide it; a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. The bullshitter is aiming for effect, not accuracy. They're playing a different game entirely.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” — Frankfurt

Bullshit is about performance. It’s about seeming confident, competent, or inspiring. And because it’s so effective, we’ve let it seep into everything. The result is a culture where we no longer expect full honesty—we expect a polished story. Something close enough to the truth that we won’t ask questions.

2. Technically and Incompletely True, Totally Useless

There’s a meme that pops up now and then that captures the absurdity of bad-faith advice:

"Why don’t poor people just buy more money?"

It’s obviously a joke. But the sentiment behind it shows up constantly in more socially acceptable forms:

"Just get a better job and you’ll be able to pay off those loans."
"Stop buying avocado toast and $8 lattes, and you’ll be fine."
"If your rent is too high, live somewhere cheaper."
"Oh, you have legal problems? You shouldn’t have broken the law."

These are all examples of advice that is technically true, but completely unhelpful. They ignore the context, the barriers, and the structural factors that make those solutions unreachable.

It’s advice given by people who don’t have skin in the game. People who have never been in the position they’re commenting on. People who say "should" a lot.

In fact, I’d argue that whenever you feel the urge to say the word "should," you should probably stop talking.

Because more often than not, it's a red flag that you have no idea what you're talking about—you just have an opinion formed from comfort, distance, and the luxury of never having needed to test your theory in real life.

And when the tide eventually shifts—when the economy crashes, when the job is lost, when the health issue hits or the court summons arrives—the very people who gave that advice are the first to want sympathy.

#FAFO

3. The Simplified Success Formula

There’s a whole genre of content now that pushes simplified formulas for success:

“Just follow these 3 steps to make $10K/month.”
“I went from broke to booked out using this exact mindset shift.”

Again, technically true—for someone. But the fine print is where the real story lives:

A partner was covering the bills.
They had access to financial help.
They weren’t in survival mode when they started.
Their first few clients came through connections they don’t talk about.

The problem isn’t that they succeeded. It’s that their story is edited for myth-making, not accuracy. It’s streamlined for sales.

When we fail to reproduce those results, the blame quietly shifts back to us:

You didn’t want it bad enough. You didn’t implement properly. You have a "scarcity mindset."

Bullshit, weaponized.

4. The Self-Made Lie

We love a clean origin story: rags to riches, against all odds, no handouts.

But those stories rarely hold up to honest scrutiny. Because in truth:

Jeff Bezos was already rich when Amazon launched.
Ali Abdaal was a doctor when his content business took off.
Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, and Meryl Streep all had terminal degrees from elite schools when they entered the industry.

None of this discounts their talent or drive. But when we ignore those parts, we reinforce a mythology that says you aloneare responsible for your outcomes.

Self-made is rarely about self alone.
It’s about who stayed quiet about helping you.

5. Schmäh: Selling the Legend

In the 2023 Netflix docuseries Arnold, Arnold Schwarzenegger reflects on his long-standing "rivalry" with Sylvester Stallone. For years, the media framed them as cinematic enemies—dueling action stars locked in competition for box office dominance. Headlines, interviews, fan debates—all fueled by the idea that these two men hated each other.

But years later, Arnold admits it was mostly theater. He calls it "the schmäh"—an Austrian-German slang term that loosely translates to charm, shtick, spin, or playful bullshit. It's not exactly a lie. It's the art of the performance. Schmäh is about selling an impression.

"It wasn't a blood feud. It was a brand strategy."

Arnold understood that a good story sells. A good rivalry sells. And a little exaggeration here and there—as long as it keeps people talking—isn't just acceptable, it's strategic.

That's what makes the concept of schmäh so essential to understanding modern storytelling: it's not about deceiving people maliciously. It's about constructing a narrative that people will buy, even if it only reflects a sliver of the truth.

That same energy powers:

Personal brands
Motivational speaker origin stories
"I hit rock bottom and now I'm a millionaire" TikToks
Fitness influencers who never mention genetics, lighting, filters, or their day jobs
I paid off my student loans last year...while I had no household bills because my parents/spouse covered them
I started my business with nothing

No, you started with nothing except decent credit, no dependents, a safety net, and maybe a parent who co-signed your lease. The myth of the self-made success story erases the fact that most people consuming this advice are starting from less than nothing—buried in debt, obligations, and systemic disadvantage.

We construct rivalries, rises, rock bottoms, and reinventions—not because they reflect the whole story, but because they sell.

So when someone says:

"I built this with grit and hustle and zero help"

...you can bet there's some schmäh in there. Some curated angles. Some crafted moments. A legend shaped in the edit.

The danger isn’t in the use of schmäh itself—the danger is when we mistake it for unfiltered reality.

And then we compare our real lives to someone else's highly produced story and wonder why we feel behind.

That’s the same energy behind so many success stories today: a little truth, a lot of schmäh.

In the movie Falling Down (1993), Michael Douglas’s character stares up at a big, glossy menu photo of a burger. Then he looks down at the sad, lifeless sandwich in his hand.

“Look at that. Now look at this.”

That’s the gap between promise and delivery. Between myth and reality. Between the image we’re sold—and what actually shows up when you buy it.

We’ve been taught to accept that gap. To call it marketing. Or branding. Or a mindset issue. But it’s really just bullshit with a decent headshot.

The Cost of All This?

When everyone is selling something, and no one is telling the full truth, trust collapses.

People become skeptical of everything. People blame themselves when they don’t succeed. People stop asking for help because they think struggling means they’re broken.

If the story of success includes all the messy, inconvenient, privileged, lucky, or supportive parts—it might not go viral.

But it would be honest.

And I think we’re overdue for that.

So Let’s Start Telling the Full Story

Tell me you succeeded, but also tell me:

Who backed you.
What you risked.
What you didn’t.
What safety nets you had.
What you would have done differently if you didn’t have them.

Tell me the story, but don’t sell me the legend.

Because if we’re going to build something real—in life, in business, in culture—we have to stop pretending the shattered glass door "just needs to be assembled."

Sometimes, it’s broken. Sometimes, it was never whole to begin with. And pretending otherwise is just another form of quiet, acceptable, everyday bullshit.