success – Page 2

The need for Eyerollers

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

I came across a @jonlovett tweet in my timeline this morning that read: “no matter who you are or what you achieve, you need people in your life who will roll their eyes at you when you deserve it.”

I agree and would push it just a bit further: the more and more you “achieve,” the more you will need The Eyerollers in your life.

In the arts, a fine example is George Lucas, of whom I wrote about in my post, “Fevered Egos”: “Creative people need somebody around telling them how dumb they’re being.”

Eyerollers are not naysayers. They’re not constantly cynical or skeptical or negative about your work. They don’t keep you down. They keep you in check. They’re editors.

See also: “You probably don’t deserve it.”

Real wealth

Friday, August 3, 2018

“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.”

I think about that John Waters line all the time.

Only trouble is, he never said those exact words. He said this (from Make Trouble):

I’m rich! I don’t mean money-wise. I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.

The late Anthony Bourdain also had a “No Asshole” rule:

It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the ‘no asshole’ rule. I don’t do business with assholes. I don’t care how much money they are offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is important. I’m fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way.

In an earlier interview, he said it even more succinctly:

I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero.” That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life.

Real wealth = no assholes.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, which seems to explain so much of our current moment, is paraphrased here by John Cleese: “The problem,” he says, with some people, “is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.”

You see, if you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are…. [Knowing] how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means—and this is terribly funny—that if you’re absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it.

Or, here’s Charles Darwin, almost 150 years ago, in The Descent of Man:

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The terrifying thing is that we live in a world in which the most confident—confident, as in con(fidence) man—often weasel their way to the top. I’m not sure that this hasn’t always been the case for at least the past thousand years, some of my evidence coming from the Chinese poet Su Shi, aka Su Tung-Po (1037-1101) in one of my favorite poems, “On The Birth of a Son”:

Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Hence, the above prayer, which was part of last summer’s art show: “Let them be smart, but not smart enough to know how dumb they are because then they are really screwed.” (At least when it comes to worldly suck-cess.)

Then again, here’s another prayer, one for decent human beings, who can be humble enough to learn and improve themselves, and just maybe, the world:

See also: You probably don’t deserve it

Suckcess

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

“Success is for creeps.” —Bobcat Goldthwait

We all know what “success” is, or at least we have our own definitions of it. (For me, it’s closing the gap between what your days look like and what you want your days to look like.)

So what’s “suckcess”? Suckcess is success on somebody else’s terms, or undeserved success, when something that sucks becomes successful, or when success starts to suck.

It’s what Jean Cocteau was referring to when he said, “There is a kind of success worse than failure.”

It’s what Pink Floyd sings about in “Wish You Were Here”:

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts
Hot ashes for trees
Hot air for a cool breeze
Cold comfort for change
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Or The White Stripes, in “Little Room”:

Well you’re in your little room
And you’re working on something good
But if it’s really good
You’re gonna need a bigger room

And when you’re in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sitting in your little room

Don’t scorn any success, or you’ll turn into Ignatious J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces: “I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”

Just be sure you’re not chasing suckcess, and if you get it, get rid of it as soon as you can.