The Great Things Other People Do

It’s not a theory we bother to articulate, otherwise we might discard it for sheer foolishness. No, it’s one we quietly believe and assuage and follow blindly after.  It’s this whole idea that you can “catch” success through your eyes by reading about the great things other people do.
 
I think it interesting to note that those hosting seminars on success did not get successful by attending them.  Rather, they became successful first and then designed a seminar around it.  What you are hearing is just a theory about what they think mattered in their journey.  Who knows if they are telling all  you need to know?
 
Staring at the great things other people do has several problems with it.  Chief among them the fact that you are seeing a journey from the destination backwards, and you are seeing from the outside in. It’s like trying to reconstruct the meal after, well, you know, after someone has “done their thing”. It’s at least twice modified: chewed, digested and ejected. It can be difficult to extrapolate all the ingredients that came before.  The prospect of reverse engineering success from the story told after the fact is no different.
 
Reading a steady diet of everyone else’s “great things” may leave you so saturated in other stories that you may lose your sense of your own.  It’s a sobering thought (and also quite true) that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his entire lifetime.  What was turned down by art dealers across Europe as worthless – what he couldn’t give away for food and board – now fetches millions. By many standards, he was failure. Dead in the prime of his life from a self inflicted gun shot wound in an act of suicide.  
 
But still, we remember his name today.  The great “copiers” of his time – those who were successful by the standards of their day, however, are part of the anonymous mass of people who form the backdrop of history.  They did other people’s paintings well.  They studied success and achieved it.  In exchange for their efforts they received a comfortable salary and anonymity.  Significance, however, slipped through their fingers.
 
Being brilliant, we can assume is quite different from being successful.  There’s nothing new in that.  Clearly Van Gogh wasn’t aiming at the latter.  He never sought to learn the kind of paintings that sold well.  Instead, he was driven by a mad fever to express himself in a certain way whether it sold or not. He had a cause.  
 
Perhaps if you aim at success and miss it, your endeavor becomes a failure by your own standard. You did what you did for the outcome and the outcome eluded you.  But if you find a cause or a passion, and you do what you do for the journey, then at least you still have that in the end.
 
If we are gazing into the accomplishments of others trying to understand success, please know that they gazed into the same possibility from the other side, before it became a success, and their motives were often quite different.  Their success sometimes came as an accident of a greater passion to serve or create or change or risk or learn.  
 
Indeed some of the greatest innovations were preceded by behavior that seemed outlandish and unacceptable at the time.  They didn’t stare into success, they stared past it to a greater idea. Maybe the best we can do is turn to our resources and our opportunities and ask what noble thing we can attempt. Let success become an accident of substance.