What I Learned From Success
I’ve always been a little suspicious of success, especially when I’ve supposedly achieved it.
I’m not really sure what it is.
As an artist, how do you know you’ve achieved success? Is it financial independence? A positive review? A satisfied audience? Fame? Or is it being able to carve out enough time and headspace to make progress on a project? Is it that rare bit of quiet time? Is it the moment you know you’re done with a piece?
In 2006, I acted in a horror film with Danny Trejo. It was one of my relatively larger roles — I played a drug-addicted convict with more swagger than brains. In one scene, my character threatened to cut Ja Rule’s eyes out. I was later brutally killed by a ghost. It was fun, although I advise you never to let them put Alka-Seltzer tablets in your mouth.
Anyway, Trejo had long been a hero of mine before that shoot. He’s the tough guy’s tough guy, with his rough-hewn face, prison tattoos and killer glare.
He’s also one of the kindest and most genuinely happy people I’ve ever worked with. He came into the makeup trailer each morning singing Johnny Cash & June Carter’s “I’m Going to Jackson,” and greeted everyone warmly. He called me “Holmes,” which made me feel an unearned sense of street pride. Whenever someone asked how he was, he replied “any day not in prison is a good day.”
He was a tough guy with nothing to prove. I suppose when you’ve been the welterweight boxing champion of San Quentin prison, you don’t really have much to prove.
On the same shoot was another actor whom I was a fan of. A former A-List character actor who’d carried a couple of my favorite blockbusters on his back. Unfortunately, he was caught in the grip of addiction, and it took a toll on his life and his career. Working with him was difficult. He was difficult, caught in the addict’s maze of charm, meanness and self-pity. When he entered the makeup trailer… he passed out in the chair.
That actor ended up throwing a mind-blowing tantrum and getting himself ejected from the set on his last night. His assistant came by the following day with signed headshots for the crew.
That experience was a master class in how to handle success, and how not to handle it.
Trejo’s humility, humor and easy grace have remained for me the touchstones to success handled well. Over the years, I’ve encountered these qualities first-hand in high-performing people across professions, from movie stars to astronauts to CEOs (although substantially fewer of the latter).
But my question remains: what is success? What does it teach us? Does it add value to our character?
Don’t misunderstand. I want us all to succeed. I hope you achieve your wildest dreams, and that they turn out to be even better than you imagined. Hell, I hope I do too.
How we measure success determines how we experience it.
For much of my life, my idea of success was very clear. I would be a movie star. Or a rock star. Or a famous novelist. Whatever, as long as I was A) Famous and B) Rich.
With each close call, I grew more disillusioned, more depressed, more isolated. I was always fame-adjacent. As I discuss in What I Learned From Waiting for Permission, I had to reevaluate everything to save myself from booze, self-pity and bitterness.
Hustle culture, capitalism and the American myth of the relentless, never-satisfied hero are as toxic to how we perceive the output of our work as any personal failure.
We are programmed to believe that success equals two things: financial wealth and renown. Amassing, securing and building wealth are the cornerstones of the American dream. Labor, character and ingenuity are only valued in their relation to creating wealth.
We are told that if we work hard enough long enough, and if we want it badly enough, it’ll happen. After all, that’s what all the Disney movies and founding father stories told us, right?
And when it doesn’t happen? What happens when we build a life dependent upon an imagined benchmark of financial success or fame or recognition, and that success never comes? Have our lives failed? Are we failures? And why? Because we didn’t work hard enough? Because we weren’t good enough?
If we base our self-worth on an arbitrary target for success, we’ll never be happy. Success targets are moving targets. If you get famous, when will you be famous enough? (See Kanye West, Elon Musk, Donald Trump) If you get rich, when will you be rich enough?
If we value our work on whether it makes us rich or known, or on whether it’s valued more than a rival’s, we’ve lost the narrative.
I’m all for hard work and for dedication to craft. I’m for sweat and blood and whatever it takes. But I’m also for living life, taking naps, lingering in cafes, skipping school to go to the movies and using all of my PTO.
Hustle doesn’t make great work. Life lived does.
A good process is more valuable than an award
I argue that the primary benchmark for artistic success must always be based on fulfilling process and meaningful work.
Awards, money and esteem are as permanent as ice cream in July. They cannot and do not sustain happiness. Fulfillment and a lasting sense of success can only come from within, and it must come from the process of creating work and your personal satisfaction with what you’ve made.
If making your work isn’t fulfilling to you, why waste time on it? There are 100 jobs out there that also aren’t fulfilling where you’d make steadier money. Trust me, I’ve worked like 30 of them and they mostly sucked.
The Oscar Curse, the Grammy Curse... for every award, there’s an example of it going wrong. I, like any of us, would be more than happy to prove any of those curses wrong, but I’m also not going to deceive myself that an award would magically fix something in my life.
Values > Goals
Your values, as a human and an artist, are the foundation of your ability to weather both failure and success.
Like a lottery winner whose life is ruined by their newfound wealth because they don’t know how to handle it, an artist who achieves quick success without a framework of principles to support them is susceptible to all the trappings that erode happiness, including arrogance and addiction (and that’s just the As).
Also, an idea of success that is built on and from your values is achievable and meaningful. When you dictate your success, you have agency in reaching it.
Art isn’t binary.
Art isn’t the stock market or a horse race. It’s not about winning and losing.
Art is not a competition.
We’re taught to see success and failure as diametrically opposed experiences. Good against bad, pride versus shame. Tupac versus Biggie.
I see them more as siblings. Sometimes one grabs all the attention and glory while the other labors quietly in the background, always learning, steadily improving. The Skywalker siblings, or Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez.
And sometimes success and failure are like the Olsen twins. You can’t really tell them apart.
And this is perhaps the most important lesson that success has taught me — sometimes it’s indistinguishable from failure. Sometimes success comes disguised as failure, and failure comes disguised as success. The important thing is not the accolade or the embarrassment, the gain or the loss.
The important thing is what you walk away with, and how you walk away.
