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| Courtesy of Harper's Bazaar |
A roomful of losers
Successful people are the ones on the red carpets, right?
They are attending premieres or being nominated for glittering prizes. We see
them dressed in designer clothes they haven’t paid for, looking more glamorous
and more successful than we will ever be.
A while ago I heard from someone who came on stage late in
an Academy Awards ceremony to announce one of the final Oscars. ‘At this point
in the evening,’ he said, ‘you’re looking out at a room that is mainly full of
losers.’
Wait – losers? Those were our successful people! Is success
so elusive that you can epitomise it one minute, and the next it slips away to celebrate
at a party to which you’re not invited?
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| Courtesy of IndieWire |
Are you a success?
Your answer will depend on the field in which you operate,
and on your dreams and aspirations.
Writers are dreamers: we all dream of success. When we’re struggling,
everyone says not to despair, because J K Rowling had her work rejected to start
with and now she’s on all the rich lists and is still writing great fiction.
At the London Book Fair last week, Millwood Hargrave’s book
Vardo ‘was the subject of a battle between 13 publishers.’ It eventually went to
Picador for a ‘significant six-figure sum’ (The
Guardian).
Are Rowlings and Hargrave the writers I should be emulating?
If so, I am falling short. For me, the rejection didn’t stop – it continued. I
ended up self-publishing, just to get Unspeakable
Things off my desk and into people’s hands (or Kindles).
Wherever you are in life, there will be someone who is doing
better than you. Someone in your industry or workplace or classroom, or at the school
gate who is your idea of success. You admire them, but with a nasty envious afterburn.
They put you in the shade and that’s a dark, cold place. They might be a real
person or a celebrity. They have made it and you haven’t. You’ll have to work
harder, or all your efforts will end in failure.
We need to rethink our concept of success
When Unspeakable
Things came out, I was filled with relief. I had wanted to write all my
life – and my lack of success was eating away at me, as if my life’s purpose
had derailed and was going nowhere. Now I had succeeded – or had I?
Once your book is out, everyone asks how it is selling. For
a while, my sales ticked up in ones and twos. I would get excited about a spike
in my KDP sales graphs, until I realised the scale: oh, that was only two books.
When people asked, I fudged the issue – with ease, because I didn’t often look
at the reports.
One day it hit me: I was in danger of not enjoying my
publishing experience for what it was, because I was worrying about what it wasn’t.
No, I was not selling millions. Or thousands. But I was into triple figures! And
it seemed that everyone I knew was reading the book, and many were saying they
couldn’t put it down. Five-star reviews were coming in and I was going to book groups
and talking about Unspeakable Things with
people who had entered the world I had created. Articles came out in the local
press and friends and family were excited for me.
Couldn't give it away...
Over Easter I scheduled a 5-day Kindle free offer on Amazon.
I didn’t look at the sales reports for days, fearing I was about to find out
that I literally ‘couldn’t give it
away’. When I looked, I saw a spike in the graph – it looked big – perhaps a
dozen books? But no – it was 761! Soon sales soared to over a thousand.
Now, this may not be your idea of success – I make no
royalties from the free purchases. But do you know, I feel much better for it.
Having adjusted my attitude to enjoy the success I had achieved, instead of grieving for heights not scaled, I allowed
myself to be very happy.
There's always someone even better
If you struggle with a sense of failure, could you stop and celebrate
your achievements? There’s always more we could aspire to, and there’s nothing
wrong with that. But if the only success that will satisfy us is something very
few people achieve, we are on a hiding to nothing.
If any achievement is followed by the sense that real success is what that even better person has, we are doomed to
think we’re failures. And then we will miss out on all the joy we could be
feeling about what we have actually done.
The happiest person at the Oscars
So here’s my step-by-step guide to success. The first step
is to work out what you want to achieve in life and focus on it. The next is
work and more work and setbacks and learning and never giving up.
But the most important step is to realise this: the success
you dream of is probably an impossible dream. Not because you’re not good
enough, but because even if you won all the prizes you want to win, you probably
wouldn’t feel the way you want to feel.
Those who have the success you aspire to probably have
another dream they’ll never achieve. If those people at the Oscars ceremony felt
that way, then they really were a roomful of losers. The happiest person in that
sparkling room was someone who was happy with their actual achievements. It is
as likely to have been one of the waiters as one of the film stars. It bet it was.
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| Courtesy of Bon Vivant |
Am I a success?
Most writers are not J K Rowling. Most make nothing much, or
even lose money. After I changed my view of success, a startling realisation
hit me. I have wanted to be a writer since I was five. Now I am a writer. I
have published a novel and over a thousand people are potentially reading it. I
make much of my freelance money from writing. I am really enjoying writing my
next novel, The Year of the Ghost. I’m
editing more and more fiction and loving working with other writers.
I could put ‘writer’ on my passport, and it would be true.
No one is battling to give me a six-figure deal. My sales
are cheering, but not financially so. I won’t be appearing on any red carpets
or peering down any paparazzi lenses.
But I am what I have always wanted to be. And I choose to
call that success.
