Success Is…
- Success Is… Jody J. Sperling 33:46
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Success is doing what you want to do on your terms. Some people define it slightly differently as doing what I want with who I want when I want.
The dictionary defines success in the following ways: noun – a favorable or desired outcome / the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence / the accomplishment of an aim or purpose / the accomplishment of one’s goals.
At its most basic level, you can view success as hearing my voice. You pulled up your podcast app, found my broadcast, and played this episode. I prefer Spotify. You might prefer Apple or Podbean, but the fact that you are listening to this episode means you had success.
This is important, because in the broader sense, we all define success subjectively. Your success would not be your significant other’s success or your brother’s success or your daughter’s success, though you may have shared successes where desires overlap. If fidelity is a marker of success for you, and your significant other value monogamy, you share that success when you limit your romantic interactions to one another, however even within that overlapping success, you’ll define success subjectively.
You might hold the opinion that viewing images of naked people does not violate monogamy while your significant other might view reading romance novels as acceptable, and in both cases, one of you is finding arousal from projections outside of each other.
You might find it romantic when your significant other surprises you with a clean house when you return from work, and your significant other might find a gift of flowers romantic, but if you receive flowers, it might seem like extra work and a waste of Money.
And before we dive into the broader subject, let’s examine one more angle to success. Success is being true to yourself. Yes, that’s another way of phrasing the original definition: doing what you want on your terms.
The reason it’s important to belabor this is because when me get into the murky middle, we’re going to have an unbelievable hard time translating information in useful ways so we can orient ourselves to success.
To make the point, let me tell you a story:
You define success as having intimacy with your significant other, and you know about yourself that it’s effective to get you in an intimate mood to receive flowers from your partner, but one day your significant other comes home without flowers and yet tries to romance you by completing a chore around the house.
You decide to read a little steamy romance while your significant other is cleaning, because you want to be in the mood, but the book gets you all hot and bothered, and you tease out a blustering curtains so that when it’s time for a little pillow talk, you’re not really in the mood, but you definitely feel you can help satisfy your significant other’s desire because your significant other did something nice for you.
Meanwhile, your significant other defines success as bringing you to the curtains blustering moment, but since you already popped, you have to act blustered when in fact you aren’t.
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You conclude your bedroom time and tell yourself everything was magical and everyone is happy, but you feel strangely dissatisfied, and your no telepath, but you feel your significant other is perhaps just a little let down too.
At that moment, you have choices: redefine success, blame your significant other for failing to meet your needs, or take responsibility for what you did that led to failure.
If you choose options one or two, you fit nicely in the majority, and if you’re in the majority, you probably doubled down and chose both options. You blamed your significant other, then decided that if they were at fault, you’d have to redefine success so you could get what you want.
Maybe this example will ring true to you in another scenario.
Let’s say you woke up with a dream to be the next Ernest Hemingway. That awakening happened after you read “Hills Like White Elephants.”
You recognized the power of the story, its subtlety, its character depth, its tension, stakes, and implications, and from that awakening you committed yourself to writing a story that would speak to readers the way that story spoke to you.
But when you set out to make that dream a success, you began to realize “Hills Like White Elephants” is deceptively simple.
You write a few stories, and they all fall flat. In this choose your own adventure you can blame Hemingway for deceiving you and jettison your goal to be his heir or you can redefine your interpretation of the goal. But either way, you fail to achieve your first vision of success.
The third option, one very few people take, is to accept responsibility for your shortcomings and turn back to the page to write more, live more, and improve until you can write that story of yours just the way you dreamed of it.
For the sake of the story, let’s say you choose to take responsibility, and you keep writing with the goal of becoming Hemingway’s heir. You get a handful of publications, and people start to discuss your talent. You land a literary agent by querying hundreds, but when you shop your book, no publishers bite.
As you begin to scrape the bottom of the publisher barrel, you recognize that your book, even if it is picked up, will have little visibility and less hype. You can then choose to blame the industry for valuing upmarket work like Twilight, or you can adapt to the market trends and abandon your Hemingway dream.
Either way, you compromise success.
Or suppose you choose the third road, and you accept responsibility for your failure to get a contract, and you study the niche Hemingway fit in and work like mad to improve your writing so the next volume of stories will wow your audience.
If you choose option three again, you’re in rarified air, but still you’re galaxies removed from Hemingway in a place called the murky middle.
In the murky middle, you’ll find the path forward harder to see. Blame lurks around every corner as does redefining success. You’ll Travel both paths accidentally and be forced to double back regularly. You’ll find several paths that appear to lead to distant places, but which might actually end up in the same place.
What you’ll learn is that authors in today’s world are held responsible for their own marketing, branding, public relations, and even social engagements, and so, even though you’ve managed to choose the Hemingway path, this far, you’ll be forced to do things that feel like distractions from the success you have so far followed to the letter.
But you know that if social media reach can get you a contract with a big publisher, you need to do it. With the same naive optimism by which you entered the battlefield of writing, you’ll start an Instagram profile.
And with the same dawning dread, you’ll realize those posts you thought looked so simple are far harder to create than you thought, bringing you right back to the place of blame or redefining success. You’ll doubtless want to blame Hemingway again, saying he never had to use Instagram, and you’ll be tempted to redefine success by saying social media just isn’t your game so you have to settle for small presses and maybe an adjunct position teaching up-and-coming writers.
Or maybe you’ll accept responsibility for your failures and learn how to make great reels that reach vast audiences. But even as you develop social media prowess, you have to keep writing, because you’re still not Hemingway. Now you have two careers, and here’s where it gets wild.
Because you’ve never given up on your dream of being Hemingway’s heir, and you’ve learned how to play the social media game in service of that, you begin to earn brand deals. Coca Cola gives you twenty thousand dollars to promote their soda in your content. Vans sees you wearing their shoes and sponsors your channel.
You become an influencer, and you start to think this life might not be bad.
Meanwhile, you get that sweet publishing contract you’d been hustling for, but the advance on royalties is a shabby five thousand dollars. Your book hits the bestseller list for a few weeks, and you learn that in eighteen months you’ll receive a check in the mail for another ten thousand dollars.
Your publisher offers you a six-figure contract if you can write two books in two years, but they retain first right of refusal, and by the way, if your book flops, you will be axed from the publisher and forgotten.
This all terrifies you and you realize with dread that when you sit to write, you can’t produce because now someone else gets to tell you how success is measured.
At the same time, you keep creating social media content and your brand deals are pulling mid six figures that are deposited in your account weekly, but when a reel fails to go viral, you lose Sleep because you’re so scared you’ve lost the algorithm.
Worst of all, people know your name and face, and the sheer volume of shittalk swirling about how you’re a poser and a capitalist pig begins to crush you.
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You decide if you can outsource some of the headaches by hiring an executive assistant you can get back to what matters, but as soon as you do that, you discover with dread that now you’re a boss, an influencer, and a writer. Hemingway definitely didn’t have to worry about that.
Now we could stay here in the murky middle, but if we do, we’ll miss something critical, and that’s the shining headstone.
Yep, you’re going to die, and when you do, your headstone will summarize your life. For the purposes of this story, we’ll assume no one gets cremated.
If you visit Ernest Hemingway’s grave, you’ll read these words: “Here lies the finest author of all time. He blew his brains out because he hated life more than he loved it.”
Okay, that’s farce. I have no idea what his headstone says, and even if I could look it up, I’m not going to, because the point is salient. Hemingway achieved what you set out to achieve and it gave him no gratification.
We could talk mental health all day, but the fact remains: Hemingway’s success failed to bring him joy.
Imagine if he’d ever chose another adventure. Imagine if he’d redefined success. What if he’d said, accolades mean little, and happiness means everything. Perhaps we’d never have had A MOVABLE FEAST, but instead we’d have grandpa Hemingway, a ninety-two year-old family man who wrote a few works of great note and a shelf full of rip-roaring yarns you love and quickly forget.
Maybe grandpa Hemingway is preferable, or maybe we should accept Idaho Hemingway, the self-murdered great.
But however you define success, understand it comes with a cost.
I decided after six years of dogged pursuit, trying to get a publishing deal at FSG that I needed to adapt my methods. When I decided that, I had to accept that success might look different for me. At the same time, I’ve kept my eye on inroads to the original goal.
While I self-publish my books, I continue to brainstorm ways to attract conventional publishers. I’m in the thick of the murky middle without clear answers on how to make my work pop.
I’ve taken countless wrong turns, given up on numerous book ideas, fielded hundreds of rejections, and questioned my sanity almost daily. My in-laws think me cooky, and if you got my wife to open up, she’d probably say I’m delusional, but I’ve never abandoned my dream of success, and that’s all I have to offer.
See, when my headstone is being carved, then you’ll be able to say either he did what he set out to do or he didn’t do what he set out to do, but unless I quit trying, success is forever pushed out to the never-coming future.
And we’ve travelled this journey together to arrive at this point. At the center of it all, there’s just this: You have no control over the moment, the method, the person or people, or the way.
Be as clever as you want. Master social media or don’t. Smile at your neighbors or the person in front of you in line at Chipotle. Write a personal note to every reader of your books. Attend a hundred networking events, or hole up in your house and watch Netflix.
As long as you accept responsibility for your shortcomings and continue working, your success is ensured. Let God or the universe or the oneness of consciousness take care of the details. Keep working.
PS:
I heard it first from Gary Vee, and it belongs here. You are already somebody. Right now, right here, today, you are someone. Success doesn’t validate you or define you.
And, from the very same man. Stop complaining, dick! Get to work. You have only yourself to blame.
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