Those who know me well know that I hate self-help gurus. There are few things more irritating than someone who has beat cancer and is now on the inspirational talk circuit trying to tell people that if they're just positive and try really hard, their lives will be amazing and their problems will be solved.
It doesn't work like that. People who are successful always seem to be blind to the the role luck played in their journey. For every guy who fought cancer and won, there are a thousand who lost. For every guy who took a business risk and it paid off big, there are a thousand who went bankrupt. There's something arrogant and sort of despicable about a guy who has had great fortune in life and has decide to attribute that great fortune to his own positive attributes. It's a justification of vanity, a way to feel like you're better than all the people who didn't succeed. It's not that they weren't lucky; it's that they didn't try. It's because you are better than them.
So when I hear someone tell me to "follow your dreams," or "winners never quit; quitters never win," or any of those other bullshit inspirational quotes about success, I groan and roll my eyes and am not inspired.
But there is a reason to shoot for what you want most of all, and no one ever told me what that was, at least not in a way that I could understand. I've learned it recently, and I wish I had known it sooner.
See, as far back as I can remember wanting to be anything, I wanted to be a writer. I planned to have my first successful novel published by the time I was 22, and have my work read in classrooms by the time I was 26. Yeah, I know.
Anyway, after I left high school, things didn't work out so well. I was a promising student. I had scholarships to Rhodes and to Washington University, but neither of them were sufficient to cover the enormous cost of a college education, and because of complications in our family, I didn't qualify for federal student loans. I was bright. I was supposed to go to a great school. But I couldn't.
Instead I got sent to a startup university run by some religious nuts. That situation turned out as predictably bad as you might expect, so I fled to California. I lived on the good graces of some bad people while attending community college and working low-end jobs. But I still had dreams of being a writer. I cranked out really shitty short stories and published them to mailing lists where I had some chance of garnering acclaim, even though there was no way these things could ever be published, anywhere. I thought I was hot shit, real talent, and nobody could tell me otherwise. Eventually I finally got into a proper 4-year university and enrolled as an English major with a creative writing minor.
There I learned that, beyond the untrained quality of my previous stories, what I was doing wasn't real writing. Real writing was literature. It was men going through life and wondering why they felt so emotionally distant from everything. It was people in other countries experiencing Hardships. It was exploring the subtleties of unusual relationships. It wasn't the fantasy books I grew up on. Those were Shit. Genre fiction was Shit. The thing that I loved and that I loved to do was Shit. One professor who I respected and looked up to categorized it with pornography: cheap gratification with transient or no value. And you can say what you like about stuffy, closed-minded academics, but when the people you like and respect, the people you rely on to teach you how to do the thing you love, tell you that it's worthless, over and over, for years, you buy into it.
Worse, I hated writing literary fiction. It was tedious and dreary and self-important. There was no joy in it. It might have been art, but I was starting to think that I didn't like art. And even if I did, so what? The mantra I heard over and over was that having a career in writing is next to impossible. You have to be lucky. You have to be writing the right thing at the right time, and get it in front of the right people and then maybe, maybe, if you're really lucky, you might earn enough from it to scrape by a meagre existence. The J.K. Rowlings of the world? The Stephen Kings? Those are one in a hundred million. By this time I knew that even if I had some talent, I wasn't the best of the best. I knew that my dream was a foolish one. It was never going to work. I would never be a successful writer. I'd never be able to live off of my writing, never see a book with my name in a Barnes and Noble. The world had no need for new stories. People were reading less and less every day. They watched television or movies. Books, the books I loved, the books that I had dreamed of writing, were just the archaic relics of a past era.
I didn't like writing. What I wanted to write was garbage. UNINSPIRED garbage. And I'd never be successful at it. My dream was dead. And so I gave up on it. I actually made myself believe that I'd never really liked writing that much anyway; that I'd only kept doing it because it was an easy way to get praise or attention from people. It had never really been in me to begin with. I knew people who were REAL writers, REAL artists, who said that they HAD to keep writing because they were COMPELLED to, that if they didn't write, the stories drove them crazy. Those were real writers, the people who had the passion. But I didn't feel that way. I didn't have a head filled with stories; story ideas were always difficult for me, and if I had them, I didn't feel compelled to put them down on paper. It was plain to me that I had never been a real writer to begin with.
And so what was I? I had given up on the only thing I'd ever really loved, ever cared about doing. I felt antsy and dissatisfied. I wanted to do something else with my life. People asked me what I wanted to do, and I didn't know. I couldn't tell them anything. I had no goals, no path forward, nothing that I strove for. My dissatisfaction deepened into depression. My self-esteem went into the toilet. I was nothing. I was nobody. I had no skills, no aptitudes, nothing I could do that was really worth anything. In abandoning and denying my dream, I'd given up on my whole life. My life, the thing that I only get one of, my one chance to grow and be happy and enjoy this world and find meaning in it, and I'd given up on it. I didn't know why I was depressed, why I had begun to hate myself so much. I just knew that I had, and I didn't know any way to fix it.
Eventually, I joined a writing group at the invitation of a friend. With his encouragement, and that of other people in the writing group, I began writing again. It was rough going. I was shaky at it, and uncertain, and I didn't like it a lot of the time. But I kept doing it, and gradually I came to discover that I had been lying to myself the whole time. I wasn't just okay at writing -- I loved doing it. I found meaning in it. I found passion that I thought I had lost. I remembered what I wanted to do with my life.
And now I'm writing books, and I don't ever plan to stop. I am a writer. I'm getting better at it all the time, and that makes me happy and excited. I owe so much to the friends who encouraged me and got me writing again and kept me at it, because I found my dream, and I found that it's not worthless.
So here is what inspirational speakers should say. Here is what I wish someone had said to me.
Following your dream is not about success. It's not about achieving. Not about winning. Most people who pursue their dreams never really achieve them. You do the thing that you love because if you don't, it kills you, not necessarily in big obvious ways, but in small, subtle accretions of self-hatred and despair. You do the thing you love because not doing it is giving up on life. It's giving up on yourself. And that makes you suffer. You do the things you love so you can love the things you do. So you can love your life. It doesn't have a point beyond that. It's not about success.
Success is a lie. Winning is a lie. Doing is what matters.
