The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer
The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer:
Lesson 3
Success Is Just a Word
I had some interesting phone conversations just a few days ago. One was with my best friend, the other was with my brother.
Both conversations were very different, yet they both converged to a single point of interest: the topic of success.
To give you an idea of what that looks like, I’ll delve into both conversations one at a time, retelling and reflecting on each one in the context of what success really means to me, and what I want it to mean to you.
At the end of this lesson we will reexamine that word and try to provide some insight into how redefining it and other words that you may, like me, have been putting on a pedestal for too long can make things a lot easier for you going forward.
Shall we then?
Phone conversation #1: My friend (2 hours 30 minutes)
I have a burning sense that some of you are looking at the length of this conversation and thinking to yourself: “Who in the world spends that much time talking on the phone with someone?”
Well, my best friend and I do, that’s who. It’s been that way with us for as long as I can remember.
We have this way of getting each other hyped up and once we start bouncing ideas off of each other and talking about our grand visions for the future, the conversations are rarely dull.
I’m sure it’s a similar phenomenon to when Joe Rogan looks at the time at the end of his podcasts with his favorite guests and can’t believe they have been talking for three and a half hours. Believe it, Joe.
Anyway, my buddy recently started a new sales job that he’s been super stoked about and since he has been busy getting acclimated to the new schedule and workload, it had been a few days since we had touched base.
So we were discussing his new gig. He spoke about the culture a lot, how it was important to him, about how they push him to be better in a good way, so on and so forth.
Then, he said, one of his partners (they don't like the word “boss” at this company, apparently) called him into his office to have a one-on-one. The first thing he asked him was:
“What do you want to get out of working here?”
Now my friend had done countless mock interviews and drilled question after question that might come up in an encounter like this during his schooling and in preparation for getting the job he now had.
But for whatever reason he said the question sort of caught him off guard. The answer he came up with on the spot was:
“I want to be successful.”
And you know what? His partner wouldn’t accept it. I thought, huh, that’s interesting. My friend was laughing telling the story which in turn made me laugh, but it also got my gears turning.
If Spiderman has ‘spidey senses’, then I guess my ‘writey senses’ were tingling.
(Since you’ve come this far in the course, I know you accept my cringy metaphors, and for that I thank you.)
Needless to say, this sparked a long conversation about how we understood where his boss was coming from.
He was trying to get my friend to dig deeper and insinuating that “being successful” was too arbitrary a concept to strive towards. Which it is.
And so we dug deeper.
It was during this back and forth philosophizing that I said the words that comprise the title of this piece: “Success is just a word.” Those words rang and echoed through my mind. And the rest... was lesson 3. Ha!
The final two cents I want to give here are that we did not dismiss the answer my friend gave, “I want to be successful,” as an incorrect response.
I rolled with the idea of striving for success and pointed out that accumulating all the wealth in the world would mean nothing to me if I didn’t have the important people like our friends along for the ride.
Several minutes of discussing what success looks like later, we came to the realization that my friend’s response was indeed not incorrect, but it was incomplete; it needed to be defined.
I defined success by aligning it with having a circle of friends and loved ones to share it with. Others might define it by some measure of financial wealth or physical well-being, but regardless of the metric, the important thing is to specifically define what success would look like for you.
By the end of our phone call, my friend was really excited to speak to his partner again because he felt he would have a much more satisfying answer to give after our conversation.
That felt like a small success for me and I was happy to have been able to provide for a friend. Go get em, bud!
Phone conversation #2: My brother (46 minutes)
My brother is, and in a lot of ways always has been, a true mountain man.
We grew up in a small rural town in New Jersey with one cornfield in our backyard and one across the street.
We also had these hills with major elevation changes behind our house that qualify as mountains for all intents and purposes. My brother, being the athlete and fitness enthusiast he is, frequented these often.
A few years ago, after migrating a few times for work and lifestyle reasons, he ended up in Montana (yeah, it literally means mountain) where he spends a lot of time running up and down, you guessed it, mountains!
And when he’s not doing that, he’s rock climbing, personal training his clients, studying to become a nurse, or being hyper-productive in some other capacity.
It’s honestly a wonder he was able to find forty-six minutes in his schedule to talk to me; the dude is the true definition of a savage.
So our discussion revolved majoritively around productivity and goals, as they often do. We’re big dreamers, you see.
My brother is an inspiring person because of his work ethic and I try to emulate some of his tenacity in my own work. I fall miles short, but I still try.
It’s sort of always been that way with us, him pushing the limits far beyond my reach, and me trying my best to catch up to him. But that’s sort of the fate of brothers’ and sisters’ relationships, isn’t it?
I suppose that sort of thing drives some siblings mad, but I can’t help but smile about it. I’m proud of him.
I have long been impressed by the endless drive my brother is able to conjure up. In fact it seems to somehow have become even more limitless in his adulthood.
But it has always represented a fundamental difference between us.
The really remarkable thing about my brother for me is the quality that I’ve only just recently realized we share: a willingness to swim upstream, as it were, to go against conventional wisdom if we believe it’s what we need to do. And something he said in our conversation solidified that for me.
He had made a resolution to not read a single book this year.
Yup, you read that right. It’s okay to laugh, I did too. But then he explained it to me. You see, you’ve already learned how driven my brother is: there’s not a single lazy bone in his body. When he decides that he wants to get something done, it gets done.
So when he says he is resolving not to read a book this year, it is because at the high level of productivity at which he operates, doing so would actually be counterproductive for him.
My brother said he used to commit to reading a certain number of books a year which I know to be true. He knows full well there is nothing detrimental about keeping your mind sharp with a good book, he simply feels that right now he can spend his time better elsewhere.
It’s not like he has cast all of his books into the fire and sworn off reading for good. But for a year, he’s leaving them on the shelves and pursuing other things that are more important to him for the time being. And I admire him for that.
I shudder at the thought of my brother having more time on his hands. It’s like Michael Jordan quitting golf to put in more time in the gym: How much more can you possibly get done?? Of course, I ask that rhetorically, because I know the answer: a whole lot more.
Never change, bro.
Define Your Success
Having spoken to my friend only hours earlier, our conversation was still fresh on my mind and I recognized that my brother has his own definition of success, as do the rest of us.
Success is one of those arbitrary words we like to throw around.
It can’t possibly mean the same thing to any two people, even if they are working together to reach a common goal; true success would still mean a different result for each of them. But the word does communicate something to yearn for, and yearn we must.
Though, without a proper examination and definition of what we want to achieve we are grasping in the dark for something, not knowing what it would look or feel like if we found it.
So I implore you, aspiring writer, to know what it is you are aspiring for.
Write down your goals, envision specifically what you want in your future, and scratch and claw your way past anyone who wants to prevent you from getting there. Just mind those claws around the people who are actually trying to help you.
I really can’t say it enough though. Define. Your. Success. It’s just a word, until you make it something much, much more.
Until next time,
Class Dismissed!
Stay tuned for the next installment of The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer: Lesson 4!
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