A really well meaning kid emailed me yesterday. He just failed out of his first year of college. He was talking passion and philosophy. His email signature was one of those lines about mission statements in Jerry Maguire and when I replied, he hit me with the Tim Ferriss autoresponder (that he’s had for several months).

“Due to a heavy workload…I’m only checking email once daily.”

Alright dude, where do you get off? I know how hard it is to fail out of college. If you’re sentient it’s nearly impossible. It’s not about passion and direction and working a 4-hour workweek. It’s about accomplishing the basic tasks that you were assigned at a satisfactory level. Then you can start to talk about the other stuff.

School sucks. There’s tons of bullshit and busy work. That’s the point. You need to be able to master that. And succeed past it to the point where you can handle it on autopilot as you focus on the things that matter. What you don’t get to do, especially as a young person, is just pretend that you’re better than doing it. Seth Godin had a cool line about this a few months ago. If you don’t have an extraordinary resume, where do you get off masquerading as an extraordinary applicant?

I always try to think: Do I deserve this? Did I put enough credit in to comfortably debit out? That’s partially the reason for this. I’m a little masochistic but that’s me. It’s arbitrary standard but I feel like the way to stay grounded is to institutionalize the idea of questioning yourself and your status.

Hard work is not fun. It’s hard, actually. And without that as a backbone or a given, moving forward is impossible. Failing out of school, getting fired, constantly being passed up, not finding a break, etc. If I can’t get the basics right, where do I get off (deserve) talking about anything else?

Just a question I tried to keep running at all times.

[*] I screen my phone calls

[*] I lie more

[*] I watch TV instead of reading

[*] My runs are shorter. I never end them with sit ups

[*] I stopped cooking altogether (down from rarely)

It’s not Los Angeles. It’s me. They aren’t changes I am particularly proud of.

Check out the balls on this guy. It’s the worst media inquiry I’ve seen to date. Think about how illiterate you have to be to judge books not on their covers but on the idea of them having covers.

This isn’t so much a new media lesson as it is one of most shocking and disturbing things you eventually realize about the world:

Most people are absolutely incompetent.

Even at the very highest levels they are incompetent. Executives. Writers. Bloggers. CEOs. PR people. The ones you read about in the paper – you meet a good chunk of them and realize, “Holy Shit, the emperor has no clothes.” They don’t know how to use common sense. They have no empathy. They can’t plan. They’re uninformed. They do things like this and then throw up their hands and wonder why it doesn’t work.

This guy is the host of his own 4 hour radio show. Not on some tiny station either. That’s pretty fucking cool. He managed to work himself firmly into the middle of a highly competitive field, name a show after himself and hold on to it.

And yet, here he is sending unquestionably the worst media request I’ve seen in the last two years. It’s so bad that I thought I must have read it wrong. There’s no way someone would admit upfront that they hadn’t bothered to read a 200 page book and then follow it up with the narcissism it would take to think that their approval would still be appreciated. No. Way. But of course, here we are.

So, if you’re sitting their thinking that it’s too hard to crack into media or maybe you don’t have what it takes to do whatever you want to do, realize this: Chris McClain is not an anomaly. He’s better than average. Some would call him accomplished. That should be the most inspiring thing in the world.