A truckload of thanks to my friend Dave for pointing me to this perfectly true and totally non-boring post by Christine Kane on “the boringness of success.”
This idea speaks to me in all kinds of ways these days. I’ve been thinking about late blooming, and about the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book Outliers. In a nutshell, the idea is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve expertise. In anything.
In my opinion, this is So. Fucking. True. In fact, I feel a blog post coming on about how much artists (in particular) who whine about this are starting to annoy me. Ah, but not today (*stepping back from the Ranty Ledge of Doom*)…
Today I want to thank Christine Kane for saying so elegantly what I think is so true, and part of what I was trying to get at when I talked about being gone from the game. Not that success is boring: I read that as, hmm, not hyperbole but shorthand. Of course it feels good to have great abs or see someone reading your book on the bus or have someone say Yes, I’ll marry you, or any of the hundred trillion other things that a human being might define as success. It’s just that it may take 10,000 hours of training or writing or working on the relationship to get to that moment — and that’s not just okay, that’s the point. Success is not the arrival, it’s the fact that we had the stones to make the journey. The arrival is the result: the success happens every single moment between now and then.
How did you know this is exactly what I needed to be reminded of today? I read it earlier, and I thought yeah, yeah, I know, *I know* — I’m happy for you. but I kept remembering it all afternoon and just came back to read it again. Clearly I needed it. Thanks.