1. Live your life normally, with normal expectations and a general sense of composure and self-assuredness.

2. Receive a small amount of good news.

3. Roll around in this good news the way a dog rolls around on a particularly scratchy carpet. Absorb the good news through osmosis directly into your bloodstream.

4. Begin to believe that this small amount of good news has set the tone for the remainder of your life. From now on, everything will be as good or better than what has just happened to you. You’re on an elevator heading straight to the top. Your happiness levels will never dip one iota below where they are right now. This is your new baseline.

5. Find yourself consistently irritated by the news of others, good or bad. News is what happens to you.

6. Console yourself by extrapolating the small amount of good news you have already received into the future — just imagine the kind of news you’ll be getting soon. It won’t just be good. It will be incredible. You will be the greatest success in the history of successes. They will have to come up with a new word just to describe how successful you’re about to become.

7. Heavily intimate to people you don’t know very well that you’re about to get some very good news. Accept their congratulations graciously.

8. Allow your hopes to rise with every email and phone call you receive. Treat ordinary people calling you with ordinary requests with obvious disappointment.

9. Receive a small amount of good news.