There’s a simple formula I’ve been using that I think could maybe be of help?

1. Define success at an early age, somewhere after object permanence but before concrete operations, before actual thinking-for-oneself really takes hold. Set goals based on society’s modus operandi. Stick to these goals for the foreseeable future, never wavering in your vision.

2. Catch a lucky break and get a taste of the success fruit early on, the wrong kind of taste that validates your unearned merit and throws you off course entirely, dismantling your trajectory as you chase that awful impregnable dragon. Use this as an justification for putting yourself at ease so growth is sparse. Stop growing altogether with the comfort of knowing that you’re Brilliant Just the Way You Are.

3. Procrastinate. Get sidetracked. Sufficiently jump from Project to Project until you have acquired thirty separate notebooks with less than one notebook’s worth of ideas between them. Go, at most, 90% of the way every time. Stop. Do not proceed further.

4. Believe in yourself for no tenable reason.

5. Make to-do lists. Make a master to-do list for all your to-do lists. Age. Make to-do lists for the past. Continue aging. Stop making to-do lists. Continue aging anyway.

6. Routinely reassess the problem with consistent inaccuracy. Step back and regroup. Fake inspiration or apophonize anything you can. Attach yourself to that new idea completely without any sense of irony. Trick yourself into thinking that this time will be different. Do this every week for six years. Don’t self-reflect or you’ll ruin it.

7. Let life go by. Get dumped or dump, it doesn’t matter. Lose your apartment. Get fired. Lose a parent. Attempt to gain perspective. Fail. Exhaust yourself with the endless resets. Wear yourself thin retreading the same ground. Keep clinging to false hope until you’re too tired to continue, and your fatigue causes you to finally contemplate your mindless perseverance. Squint. Begin to scrutinize.

8. Hate yourself, just a little bit - facetiously at first, before it starts to spread more meaningfully, before the reality of it really starts to ring true and slowly becomes all-encompassing and engulfs you. Cancel all future plans so you can really focus on the loathing.

9. Spend hours a day lying on the couch, every minute chastising without acting, wallowing without deserving. Really soak in the minutes so that you’re consciously aware of time’s relentless slog. Add them up to quantify how useless you are. Keep a running tally. Try to get the high score. Collect enough wasted hours where you could feasibly trade them for three or four well-polished completed projects. Think about this often. Make it cyclical. Self-fulfill your prophecy. Spiral.
[Editor’s note: Oh, and this part is really important - do this for years.]

10. Confide in the wrong people. As a result, lose trust in the rest of people. Abandon your last bastion of friendship. Sever all chances for that lone connection you yearn for. Isolate yourself.

11. Compare yourself to others, and realize, rightly, how inferior you are. Be entirely correct about it. Rationalize your inferiority in a multitude of ways, none that matter.

12. Become entirely jaded, not just the Jade of Youth, but the Rational Jade. The Absolutely Sincere Jade. Really and truly believe you have nothing to offer, and that you have no control either way, even if you did. Remember that the universe is random, and that you are just one instance of an idea of reactionary thinking. You are simply a victim of circumstance. Embrace your insignificance more than you ever have before.

13. Isolate even further somehow. You are already as isolated as you can be, but keep going. Never call anyone, never text. For the Love of Success, do not reach out. Leave simple cry-for-helps on your social media. Watch as they get no attention to confirm your dread.

14. Isolate yourself from yourself. Ignore all thoughts, become immune to emotion except in those frequent instances where you burst out crying at the slightest chord progression or offhand anecdote. Become the Connoisseur of Tears. Use your newfound sagacity to notice patterns and establish habits to make yourself cry. Be in control of that and that alone. Adapt yourself to this new lifestyle.

15. If you absolutely must leave your house, go to your job still. No longer even attempt to keep up the facade. Stop drawing on Post-it notes during meetings. Allow co-workers to tell you that you look tired all the time. Laugh because laughter is required and say you were out late, when what you mean is you’ve been checked out as of late. Have your boss ask you, with alarming concern, if everything’s okay. Hesitate for just a moment, pretend to almost debate to tell the truth, before saying, “Yeah, why?“ Be reprimanded on your performance. Deserve it.

16. Don’t be depressed. Depression’s boring. Depression is justifiable. Instead, be absolutely nothing it all. Exist under no circumstance. Find any excuse not to matter. Continue your awful trends.

17. Occasionally, in rare moments of lapse, pick up a pen and put it down immediately. Lose all interest in your previous identity. Forget your themes. Be more unwilling than unable, but definitely unequivocally unable, to say anything with determination. Stare blankly at your blank sheet of paper as if a mirror, but not in the good way. Lie back down, but don’t sleep. Never sleep.

18. Relive the good parts of the past to make you feel bad about the present. Relive the bad parts of the past to make you feel bad about your inescapable future. You must only Relive because you are not currently, technically, alive.

19. During all of this, slowly start redefining success to mean whatever you need it to mean at the time. To mean: Wellness instead of Wealth. To mean: Comfort instead of Change. To mean: Children and a Dog instead of Ambition and a Future. 
Success is: walking a few hundred steps today.
Success is: eating something that’s not delivery.
Success is: eating, at all.
Success is: a smile at some point, even if on accident.
Success is: writing an essay and actually finishing it.

-Optional Step-
[Editor’s note: I haven’t quite reached this step but it seems like it should work.]
Somehow, with unimaginable strength of will, channel all of this, and, succinctly and desperately, create. Be okay all of a sudden and for the rest of your life. Never stop creating, or else.

20. Achieve success.