Success Is A Myth
Here’s the truth — and a better story worth telling.
Five years ago, at age 30, I was homeless. You’re probably wondering how that went down and why. (Or, maybe you’re not. But you clicked on a Medium column with “Success” in the title, so, hey, you’re probably here for a comeback story.) I’ll give you the Spark Notes version.
I had a job working at as a niche publishing company’s marketing director — a job I absolutely loathed, working for the type of man who once said something along the lines of “dark girls on covers don’t sell magazines” — and I was unceremoniously terminated in March 2012. (While I was out sick with pneumonia, no less.) I numbed my depression and anxiety by mixing Xanax and beer like spaghetti and meatballs. I had been living in Austin, Texas for 15 months, but I worked from home and had never gone out and met anyone, so I had zero friends locally. I just laid on the couch, gorging myself on pizza and wings, watching basketball and watching my bank account dwindle.
To get off the couch, I grabbed my guitar and went out into the big scary world and started playing open mics, staying out till 2 a.m. and shooting whiskey until strangers became friends. I routinely panhandled for gas money to get to where I was going.
The 401K I could have withdrew from — one from which I could have given myself the money I needed to get by — was in a blackout period, being held hostage by my old employer while they switched providers. I had a credit score in the 400s, so I took out title loans and payday loans to cover the costs of living while I was in between jobs, eventually racking up over $55,000 in toxic debt.
I eventually worked up the motivation to start applying to jobs — about 10 or so per day — and even had an interview and an offer with the Austin School of Real Estate, until the CEO of that outfit ghosted on me after I told him I could be available “ASAP.”
I was evicted from my apartment in July. I moved myself and my cat down to San Antonio to stay at my girlfriend’s place while I continued to look for work. I took a freelance job writing sports columns at a content farm, where they’d pay me like $7 a month to crank out five columns per week — really soul-sucking columns like “Top 20 Hottest Volleyball Players.”
I got an interview at a large tech company in the Austin area. Had another interview. Then another. On the day I actually got offered the job, writing the pop-up ads you try and block, my car was repossessed. I was then stuck in San Antonio, and had no credit card, so I had my girlfriend rent me a Jeep that I could drive up to Austin and live in it for three weeks until I got my first paycheck. I panhandled on the side of the road for food. I didn’t shower or brush my teeth. On the day I got my first paycheck, my 30th Birthday, I got my car out of the impound, slept in that thing for two more weeks, and then slept at a shitty Red Roof Inn for another seven weeks after that, until I could afford to move into a one-bedroom on December 1, 2012. That was then.
As of this writing, I have $49,000+ saved up, a day job that puts me squarely in the U.S. middle class, a freelance business that cracked $20K in revenue between various (legal) side-hustles, a credit score in the 600s, a condo in a desirable neighborhood, and zero debt. That’s a turnaround of over $100,000 in net worth in five years.
So this is a success story, right? Where I’m going to teach you the secrets of how to pull yourself out of an adverse situation, manage your money and your mind and your career, and make something of yourself, right? No, this is not that. To tell you about my life’s journey between then and today would be boring and useless to you — a lot of “I went to work and just kept showing up” type of nonsense. And, worst of all, I’ll let you in on a boring truth: I don’t feel all that much different today than I did back then.
Yes, I feel better, and I’ve accomplished a lot and I’m certainly comfortable … but am I really $100,000+ better because I’m miles more successful by arbitrary metrics of “success?” No. You’re probably asking why. I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Success is a bullshit fairy-tale people tell you to inspire you to continue reading more bullshit fairy-tales and make you feel like you’re on the road to somewhere great, without actually getting you any closer. It’s an addiction, a longing, a lacking, a hunger. For there to be an idealized vision of success, we must first need to view ourselves as insufficiently successful. We must have somewhere to aim, someplace to go — a distant star worth reaching. And then we get there, and we don’t feel much different. That’s success. That’s the bullshit. I’ve read more words on success than I can possibly count or recall. The only words that made me more successful are later in this column. The secret to my success was giving up on the idea of success altogether. It doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t be chased.
Success doesn’t exist because, once you achieve it, you’re going to look around and ask yourself, “What else?” It’s not your fault. It’s wired into our psyche. We’re all just lost in a desert we didn’t ask to be born into, looking for water. Your mind tricks you. What you had before may not compare to what you have now, but what you have now will almost certainly not be enough. For every moment that passes after achieving a thing, your enjoyment of — and satisfaction with — that thing wanes over time. Every time you line up to kick, you’re either going to miss the goalposts, or move them back. With every new bar we clear, we inevitably raise it again.
Instead of aiming toward success: ask yourself what you like to do, what you’re willing to suffer for, and what problems you want to solve. Then, go out and do those things, suffer for those things, and solve those problems. This will bring you joy, peace and purpose. These are far better and more permanent than success itself.
Okay, so how, in just five years, did I go from being a panhandler living in a Jeep to right here? There’s a complex network of opportunities, luck, skills and relationships that come into play. The course of events that lead one person from Point-A to Point-B will be pretty unique. That’s pretty much true across everyone’s story, and anyone who tells you otherwise or tries to simplify that for you is a bit of a snake-oil huckster: There is no magic bullet.
Here’s all I know: And you can use this if you want to, or you can let it wash over you and slap the next reader in the face instead.
- I started with two passions: writing words and making music. I wasn’t thrilled about anything else and I didn’t have a backup plan. So I made a decision to do those two things, and only those two things, until I found something else I liked to do — money be damned.
- I did these often enough that I got pretty decent at writing words and making music. These two skills can fill a need and solve a problem for others, so I was able to turn those hustles into a profitable, and — here’s the key here — still enjoyable enterprise.
- Other people noticed that I got pretty decent at writing words and making music. So they reached out to me and offered me promotions, plus new opportunities, and more money, to do these things. So I kept doing them.
- I took the money I made and did three things with it: paid off my debts, stashed it in savings, and spent it on other shit I really, really love to do — like traveling to Miami to drown myself in craft cocktails and watch the Buffalo Bills lose, running half-marathons on weekends, and binge-eating ramen in the company other good people. That’s it.
Now I spend eight hours every day doing something I love to do at a place I enjoy doing it at. I make money doing other things I love to do when I’m off the 9-to-5 clock. I sleep for eight hours. I go where I feel like traveling (within reason and as budget allows), eat the food I want to eat, and spend my time doing the things I want to do with the people I want to see. I don’t have goals. I don’t make (hard) plans. This is just how I allocate my time, energy and capital. And it’s satisfying.
Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist, founder of logotherapy and Holocaust survivor, wrote the seminal psychiatry dissertation Man’s Search For Meaning and included this lucid observation in its text:
“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
Life is a goddamned topsy-turvy, chaotic mess, which will deal you some unfortunate cards, dealt occasionally from your own hands. It’s going to blow you to pieces while you contemplate your next move, and endlessly monitor and analyze and react to reasons and inexplicable insecurities, leading you to overthink and underact. Gravitate toward what you love and keep doing it until people stop asking you to. Do what you love to do, and if you do enough of it well, you won’t have idle time to waste doing things that suck the life out of you.
The secret to succeeding at anything is disciplining yourself not to remember your failures or expect anything at all.
That way, no matter where you end up, or how fast you get there, or wherever the road takes you or whether you’re traveling in a rental Jeep or sleeping in a Red Roof Inn, you’ll always feel at home. That’s where success finds you — when you’re not out trying to look for it.
