“Only YOU can do something about it.”

“Let me hear you all shout out loud ONLY.I.CAN.DO.SOMETHING.ABOUT.IT!”

The capacity crowd at the stadium dutifully shouted back to Timothy Robbins, not wanting to miss out on any of his calls to action that could guarantee success, wealth and eternal happiness in their lives. As his seminars progress, crowds usually loosened up enough to incorporate foot stamping and fist waving with the shout backs of rallying lines that Timothy asked them to repeat.

Timothy, not to be confused with Andy, although secretly Timothy is always a little chuffed at the confusion, is a motivational speaker. It just so happens they share a surname- quite fortuitous for Timothy going by the number of calls received by the booking agency after people have attended his seminars only to see his face for the first time and realise that they got the wrong Robbins. However, according to Timothy’s estimations, 75% of people who attend his seminars under the misunderstanding of which Robbins they will be seeing leave feeling that it didn’t matter because they walked away with The Skill, an as yet to be trademarked set of guiding principles for life.

Seminar attendees were initiated into The Skill, and also received a Success Pack with a signed postcard sized copy of the principles; a bumper sticker; a silicone wristband inscribed with “The Skill”; and Timothy’s self-published hardcover book elaborating on the guiding principles, complete with high resolution images of Timothy and the cars, houses, holiday destinations and other countless ways that he  spent the spoils of his “Mega, Mega Success”, as he likes to refer to it.

He’d started his own speaking circuit after attending a seminar by Andy and seeing that half the battle was believing that you can do it. So, half believing that he could, he started an online campaign to raise some capital, set up a Facebook page and populated it with many motivating images and quotes from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Maya Angelou, Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, Johnny Depp, Oprah, and Martin Luther King, and the followers came. A novel dance on YouTube, what his detractors call a “dad dance” promoting the seminar went viral and the rest, as they say, is history.

The crowd hushed and Timothy did what he always did for dramatic effect. He paused, for a very long time.

“…”

He found it drew the audience in, but it also gave him time to work out what to say next.

“I can see angels around you. They shimmer like mirrors in Summer” he wasn’t averse to reciting song lyrics, and figured he’d continue with the Kate Bush song that was still running through his head since the Taxi ride from the airport to the stadium. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t provided any context to the lyrics he quoted, he found that people were able to draw a positive message from any word he spoke, except perhaps for the time he’d decided to quote Jerry McGuire and simply posted on his Facebook page “Show Me the Money”. The naysayers had a field day with that one, and it took some careful wording to keep fans on side.

And so doing what seemed to come naturally to him, even if he only half believed in it, success came to Timothy and he felt more and more qualified to tell others the secrets to his success, which made him sound more authoritative on the topic and in turn made him more successful. The only trouble was, in order to keep believing in himself, he had to keep attending Andy Robbins’ seminars, with fees rising exponentially, the more Andy Robbins seminars one attends, so he always felt just short of being able to truly live the life he had originally half believed he could, with constant flying visits across the world to attend an Andy seminar for a top up of confidence. Rumors had it that once a commercial flight to Mars got off the ground, Andy seminars would only be held on the red planet. Meaning more travel, was Timothy’s first thought.

Of course, at the Andy seminars, with Timothy’s own fame growing, he had to disguise himself, and the more famous he got, the more elaborate the disguises became, until he resorted to plastic surgery – a nip here, a re-sculpt of the chin line there, some hair implants to cover this patch, etc. Before he knew it, he was a completely different person, and now everyone mistook him for Andy, even when they saw his face.

Use the first line of the last song you listened to as the first sentence of your post. Prompt from The Daily Post, using the line “Only you can do something about it.” from Kate Bush’s Among Angels.