Name dropping. It's everywhere.

Name dropping defined is "mentioning someone to someone else with the intention of impressing the second someone of your importance through your knowledge of the first someone." Got it? Good. I should write my own dictionary. I could have Gary Larson draw illustrations (notice, the first dropped name is on the books).

We've all seen it. "Do you know so and so? Oh, you really should meet her. She's a good person to know if you're interested in colon hydrotherapy."

Deep down, the person so addressed hears the unsaid words "I know her and therefore I am more important than you." The person so addressed hears, understands the inner meaning, and then immediately comes up with a name of their own and the game is on.

Why I write about name dropping is because I am an experienced name dropper. In fact, I've dropped just about everything throughout the years. But name dropping is a special talent of mine.

It's like this. I'm ambitiously lazy. Ambitiously lazy is defined as "motivated to achieve great things with little effort." Name dropping is a short cut to perceived success. Perceived success being defined as "having others think highly of you whether you are high or not." All drug references in this article should be ignored as consistent with my law school's distinguished code of conduct.

You can see why the ambitiously lazy would embrace name dropping as a legitimate means of bypassing legitimate successful people in perceived success. In fact, perceived success is closely associated with ambitious laziness because it can be achieved so much easier than unmodified success ("accomplishing important things for the right reasons.")

But back to name dropping as a short cut to perceived success. Another way to achieve perceived success is to actually succeed. Yes, I know, it sounds trite, but it's a fact of life. This generally involves long periods of sustained effort. Academically this is called study; in professional life it's called work, etc. The attractiveness of name dropping as a short cut to perceived success should be apparent.

To be fair, name dropping is often a sincere, unselfish form of human interaction. But let's face it, it's often not. Normally it's like an extra shot in your latte to make up for lack of sleep. It's a short cut to make up for something lacking. It's the proverbial carpool lane to let us catch up to those people who actually left on time.

Therefore, you should know that name dropping to achieve perceived success has long term dropbacks if not handled properly (Note: warning to the ambitiously lazy). The fact of the matter is, even perceived success is hard to maintain without unmodified success (see infra). This is extremely unfortunate for my fellow ambitiously lazy name droppers. In fact, it leads to the inevitable (but shocking) conclusion that some sort of work is necessary to make lasting progress in this life.

Don't become suicidal.

I'll write on happier topics in the future to cheer you up on your breaks from work.

As for now, I'm off to dinner with Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman (it's duty, you know).