process over success

I’m over success stories.

If you’ve defied odds and come out on top, I think you should be proud. And you should share your story. But I’m tired of being handed those stories as the ultimate motivation. 

The daily doodle account that accumulated 100k followers in 8 months because ‘they kept going.’

The self-published book that got picked up by a big-name house and is now an international bestseller.

The podcaster who’s booking world famous guests on their homespun show for weirdos that they ‘never gave up on’. 

This is my problem with success stories — the successes are always monumental. And they’re worth celebrating. But they stack up, build towers of improbability that cast the path in dense shadow. (I know cheesy metaphors like that aren’t going to get me that book deal/award/avalanche of likes, but I soldier on.) 

Give me your quiet triumphs. Tell me about the 10th person to subscribe to your newsletter. Let us toast to writing that story you’ve been trying to get out for years. Celebrate the vulnerability and consistency that isn’t rewarded with fame. Celebrate the work. 

Success stories skip the work. It’s mentioned, montaged into a blur of messy hair and lukewarm coffee, late nights and crashing computers. But it’s a moment, a stop along the way. Once the story brings us to the point of success, there’s no more work or mess or struggle. However hard-earned, the success comes with the reward of smooth sailing — to the point that any admission of stumbling or having to work hard again looks like failure in this light. 

The truth is that it’s always work. We’ll always have to keep trying, keep backtracking and learning the same lessons, keep getting better by understanding where we actually are and what will really help us move forward. There’s no promised land or VIP lounge that success will unlock where our self-doubt and scheduling conflicts and families and responsibilities and creative blocks and bad ideas and flops won’t follow. 

I want to see you celebrate the work that you’re doing despite all of that, against the current of everything that makes it work. I want to cheer for you as you go along. I want to be there when it’s messy, not just when it’s company-clean and polished. 

When our hands are dirty, when we’re knee-deep in the process, when we’re looking at the unripened potential and the harvest is still a dream. 

If you want to be in process with some fellow creatives and practice celebrating the work, there's still time to join us for Write Start. We go until Feb 6th and the community has been even more inspiring and nurturing than I knew it would be. People have ben reconnecting with their writing, launching new projects, publishing, submitting to magazines and journals, and (my favorite) thinking about their writing and themselves in new, fortifying ways. You'll get lifetime access to the entire program's prompts and activities and I still have a $10 off opportunity for one participant. Email me if you're interested or book a spot at the link above!