Success Doesn’t Exist

By the mid-1880s, Mark Twain must have felt that he had achieved a success that far outstripped even the grandest boyhood dreams of a red-haired kid from Hannibal, Missouri. Decades after he’d gotten started by writing sketches for regional magazines like The Carpet-Bag and The Overland Monthly, he had become a nationally famous humorist, one of the richest writers in America.

But he did not want to be a mere writer. He wanted to be a titan.

He began investing in an invention by James W. Paige. Paige wanted to build a new sort of typesetting compositor, one that he and Twain were convinced would revolutionize the newspaper and book publishing businesses.

But the machine never quite worked. By 1890, Twain’s initial investment had swelled to over $250,000 — over five million in today’s dollars — and he had nothing to show for it. Not ten years prior, he mused, he had been “one of the wealthiest grandees in America — one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact.” Yet because he had wanted greater success than what he had already achieved, he was now almost broke. Today, he continued, “if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask you to take my note instead.” He narrowly dodged bankruptcy because of the inescapable suspicion that his success — his sold-out lecture tours, his mansion in Connecticut, his face on a box of cigars — somehow was not successful enough.

For Twain, success didn’t feel like success. Many people probably understand this feeling in their own way. I know I do. Eight years after beginning the research and maybe half a lifetime after first feeling that I would someday like to be a writer, I had a book finally published. Like all achievements, it was something of a disappointment. I knew it would be. Holding your first book in your hands is like visiting your childhood bedroom: You’ve seen it in your head a thousand times, but somehow you thought it’d be bigger.

Today’s Success is Tomorrow’s Failure
The moment of success has already begun to fade on the instant it arrives. This is the way of most things, but especially of success. Its noontime signals the onset of its darkening. On the day you finally learned to ride a bicycle, you succeeded at something. Weeks of encouragement and scraped knees culminated in a dozen yards of throat-catching joy. But the very next day, the same act meant a little less. The following month, less still. And so on until today, where if a man were to congratulate you on having learned to ride a bike you would rightly understand him to be insulting you. The dreams of one age become the humiliations of the next.

Successful people are successful at failure. The greatest baseball player in the world only hits the ball 40% of the time. Success, he knows, is just a brief respite from a drenching cascade of failure.

But the real problem is that we get accustomed to success. We learn to recognize it as a new kind of failure. When you’re starting out, you think of success as being like a locked room, one you imagine to be paneled in dark mahogany and redolent with the smell of leather. If you could just get in there.

But if you do get in, you’ll discover you had it wrong. The room is nice enough, but not nearly as sumptuous as you imagined, and at its far end is another locked door. Everyone is clustered around that far door, like iron filings to a magnet. Should you get through that door, you’ll discover another room, with another door. And then you’ll start to figure it out.

Success isn’t something you get to. It’s a near-infinite chain of rooms, each more luxurious than the last. The rooms get larger as you pass from door to door. They get more sparsely peopled. But no one ever wants to stay in the room they’re in, and no one ever wants to go back through the door in which they came. Though the men and women dress and eat and talk better in each subsequent room, they never, not once, stop staring with steady and wolfish gazes at the door to the next room. If they could just get in there.

You may start to wonder about the last room in the chain. It must be impossibly huge, with more space than any man could ever need. Perhaps only one man has made it this far. The type of man who has bent history to his whim. Maybe this room, you think, has no second door. Maybe this is the last room. For the last man. Maybe this is where success is.

But no: the last man is staring with a steady, wolfish gaze at a blank spot on the wall. He has found a blade and is trying, with terrifying intensity, to cut a second door in the wall.

The Trouble With Success
As Mark Twain eventually realized, the trouble with success is that it doesn’t exist. Success is little more than a lull before you need even more success.

You can spend a lifetime trying to enter a room, but once inside, you won’t last five minutes before you begin hungrily eyeing the door to the next. And at that point, whatever success you’ve spent years acquiring will transmute into a gaudy, pretentious failure from which you can’t disassociate yourself fast enough.

So do not make the mistake of assuming that success will bring contentment. Like Twain, you may think that once you get in there that it will be enough. But it won’t be enough. The truth is that it will never be enough. And even if you stand before kings and counselors it will still not be enough, for you will soon come to loathe them and wonder what room you have to attain in order for them to kneel before you.

Stephen J. Mexal is an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton and the author of Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West