Writing

You’re Always More Successful Than You Feel

Do you remember your first time?

Louis CK has a bit about how quickly a delightful new thing can turn into the minimum we feel we’re entitled to. He’s on a plane, and the attendant announces over the tannoy that there’s free WiFi available on the flight. The guy next to him can’t get over how incredible it is. They’re 30,000 feet in the air, and they’re browsing the internet on their laptops. It’s magical. And they’re getting it for free!

Then, as if things were going a little too smoothly, the WiFi suddenly stops working. Another announcement comes over the tannoy apologising for the inconvenience. And the same guy, bearing in mind that he didn’t even know this technological marvel was possible until a few hours ago, responds with four words, “Well, this is bullshit”.

I still remember getting my first follower on Medium. I remember the first time somebody clapped for something I wrote. I remember how good it felt to receive my first comment and to earn my first few cents. Of course, being a typical, impatient human being who can switch from delighted to entitled in the time it takes to refresh my browser, that sense of satisfaction didn’t last long.

Once the euphoria of those “firsts” wore off, I became impatient for the cents to turn into dollars. I felt dissatisfied because I didn’t have fifty followers yet, and as soon as I did, I wanted a hundred. I was disappointed if an article didn’t receive hundreds of claps. Actually, let’s be honest. I still am.

When hitting one benchmark became more commonplace, I set a new one. Each new achievement became a new baseline that I was disappointed to fall below. Every time I read an article by somebody who was making more money or getting more views or getting curated more often, I’d feel as if I was losing a competition that nobody else was participating in.

If you’re a writer on Medium, especially if you’re a new writer, you can probably relate. You’re going to read a lot of articles about how much money people are making and how quickly they made it. Some of them will have advice that you can learn from. Some of them will inspire you to keep going when you’re feeling demotivated. But none of them is a measure of where you need to be. Or what you’ll feel like when you’ve “made it” to that level.

As I teeter on the brink of reaching a thousand followers, I’m realising that the point when you feel like you’ve “made it” never comes. And why should it? Jeff Bezos still goes to work every day even though he has more money than God. Great athletes like Anderson Silva continue to compete well after their best days are behind them, even though have nothing to prove. JK Rowling still writes, even though she’s been more successful than any writer in history.

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Writing, running an online shopping empire, figuring out how to make a decent poached egg, they’re all a never-ending series of goals and challenges that will change as you pursue them. Even if there were a magical number of followers that you could gain or dollars that an article could make, if you want to have a career rather than a momentary sense of achievement, you’re going to have to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again.

Everybody wants to make more money or be more successful at what they do. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you or themselves. Still, it might be helpful to remember that success isn’t always at some far off point in the distance. When I got my first follower, a thousand seemed like it was a pipe dream. Now it feels like a minor blip. Success seems to be a moving target, always somewhere ahead of us, accelerating so fast that we rarely feel as if we’ve hit it. It’s only by looking back from time to time that we can see that we’ve already hit it thousands of times.