Success Leaves Clues
But can you trust your decoder ring?
I’ve written before about jealousy and how it gets a bad rap. About how it is possible to be both excited for someone else’s success and sad about not hitting the same milestones ourselves. About how beating ourselves up about that isn’t productive. One tempting way to turn jealousy into something that feels more useful is to look at the success of the other person and unpack how they got where they are. How exactly they achieved that thing we want. This is at the heart of the oft-used phrase success leaves clues.
Like many quippy, easy-to-repeat pieces of life advice this one is both true AND way more complicated than it would seem. Sure, there are likely habits, behaviors, and maybe even specific strategies that another person has used that will be really helpful to us. However, sorting these out requires a lot of discernment and sometimes it’s hard to maintain the appropriate perspective necessary to decode those clues in a useful way.
The first thing to be cautious about is remember that we’re looking for clues. The clever little motivational phrase is not success leaves a super detailed and specific roadmap. That’s way too long to turn into a hashtag and it’s also just wrong. It’s tempting to dissect another person’s journey to success and come up with a list of things they do: writes at 5:00am every morning, makes one Instagram post every day, hosts a Facebook live event on the first Thursday of every month, sends a newsletter every week, has sparkling wine and fancy cheeses every time they finish the a draft of a book.
You could take all those exact same actions and not have an ounce of success. Maybe your audience is on LinkedIn, not Instagram. Perhaps they could care less about a Facebook live, but would love it if you included short videos in your monthly newsletter. Maybe you’re more of a crisp Belgian beer and pizza kind of person. As tempting as it is, we can’t just follow someone else’s map. But-- there are clues in there: this person you view as successful is super consistent with a set time for their creative work and a routine for reaching out to people interested in what they are creating. They also celebrate successes, and not just the big ones, but the finished an iteration of the final thing ones. Those are the clues you can follow.
Which brings me to the next point of caution. Pulling those clues out of someone else’s roadmap can be tricker than it seems. I just made it look easy for the sake of demonstrating a point, but if you’re looking for these clues in real life when you’re feeling particularly low about your own success, it’s easy to misread them. In the example above, it would be really easy to look at all the things that other person is doing (getting up early, posting to social media all the time, writing a weekly newsletter) and say to yourself: “They are successful because they work really hard. I’m super lazy and that’s why I’m not as successful.”
I recently read Jon Acuff’s book, Soundtracks (highly recommend). I think the series of questions he lays out for evaluating the thoughts we play on repeat in our heads (our soundtracks, as it were) are really useful for decoding the clues we want to take away from someone else’s success: Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind?
Using this lens, let’s look at “They are successful because they work really hard. I’m super lazy . . .” Is it true? Perhaps, it is quite possible that this other person may be putting in more focused time than you. They may also have done more upfront work on figuring out where the audience for their work hangs out online so they knows strategically where to market on social media. Is it helpful? Quite possibly. Looking at how someone else prioritizes their time or how they researched their audience might be really useful to you and your work. Is it kind? Here’s where this clue you’ve sussed out gets it wrong big time. Adding the value judgement about being lazy is zero help and not kind.
While it is good to notice someone else’s work habits and reflect on what you are doing and how you are using your time, it is NOT a reason to beat yourself up for doing things differently. You might inventory your life and decide you want to devote more time to your creative venture or that you’re already giving all you can. There is no one right path to success. Analyzing someone else’s success might lead somewhere helpful. Calling yourself lazy will just make you shut down.
So sure, success does leave clues. But don’t be fooled into taking off your decoder ring when you go looking. Instead polish it up with some extra discernment. And, if you take nothing else away from this, remember first and foremost— be kind to yourself.
Things of Beauty
Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).
“Gentle January” as described in this article by Abagail Koffler at This Needs Hot Sauce and this post from Kath Brooks. (*Abagail’s weekly newsletter, This Needs Hot Sauce, is awesome— especially if you love food and NYC!)
This tweet about setting FUN goals. Perfect for reluctant goal-setters like me!
These cinnamon roasted almonds. They smell delicious roasting and taste even better.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about snow in the city. The gray piles of it that accumulate post-plowing are pretty depressing, BUT those first few moments of every-tiny-limb coated quietness are always a bit magical:
How’s your January going? Gentle or not so much? Leave a comment and let me know! And keep those decoder rings set to “kind,” okay?
Be well,
Mary-Chris