5 Ways To Work Harder, Get Better, And Avoid The Perils Of Success

Most people want to succeed in life. They want to have dreams and accomplish them. There are few who want to be failures. Now there is importance in failure, which I have written about previously and will do so again in later posts; nevertheless, that is not my focus here. 

We live in a karaoke culture--a stage culture in which overnight success is a reality show away. It is the age of the ordinary person having an extraordinary night on stage and becoming 'successful', which means a mere moment in the sun followed by a plummet back into the abyss of the ordinary--the reality show giving way to the big reality check. 

Who wants success anyway? Hasn't anyone read the Catastrophe of Success by Tennessee Williams? Published in the New York Times on November 30, 1947, it is a letter by the great writer lamenting the success of the Glass Menagerie and how it nearly destroyed his life. Living in a hotel in New York waited on hand and foot left him listless, cynical, lazy. He underwent several eye surgeries simply to have an excuse for gauze to be put over his eyes so he didn't have to look at what his life had become. In the process of success, he had lost the work ethic and diligence and authenticity that got him there in the first place. Here's Williams himself:

"I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporarily that the green satin looks like slime on stagnant water."

Eventually Williams left New York for a small part of Mexico where the swimming was good, and he could live without being noticed; a place he could find the hard work and struggle that created the famous play that nearly destroyed his life. He wrote another work that become his famous "A Streetcar Named Desire"

What's William's main point? We need hard work, menial effort, and a life of relative discomfort to accomplish our goals. That it is in the hard daily work that we find our authentic selves. We need a place of routine and discipline that the place of final arrival can shake out of us, leaving us slaves to our past success rather than pushing our boundaries into greater ideas and personal expression. 

"There's no substitute for hard work," a professor of mine once said--those words changed my life. Persistence, tenacity, sweat and tears--without them we don't create, we simply conform. 

So with this in mind, here are a few take-aways:
 

1. Discipline yourself: If the only time you can get real work done is at 5am, this is your top appointment of the day. Does it suck? Sure. Could you use the extra sleep? Maybe. Does it mean you can't stay out late with the boys every night? Yup. But what would you rather have, the accomplishment of your goals or yet another beer? If getting up at 5am requires you to get to sleep at no later than 11 o'clock, then that's your new bedtime.

2. Befriend discomfort: We are bound by comfort in these modern times. In fact, if we don't have comforts--all of them at our whim--then we think there's something wrong with us. But that's not the life of hard work. This kind of work requires discomfort, sacrifice, pain. If you want to sit on the beach your whole life, that's your choice--but chances are, there's something nagging inside you left unfulfilled. When J.D. Salinger went to write, he put on cover-alls and carried a lunch box into his writing room--he knew the struggle of hard work.

3. Don't compromise: Your work will require something very specific at each moment--how authentically you adhere to that demand will determine the quality of work. If you compromise for one moment to save time or effort, you're hooped--and you'll know it. If your work demands 4 iterations and you only give it 2, you'll know it. 

4. Forget the last success: You're only as good to the public--whatever that is: boss, co-workers, clients--as your last success; but you're only good to yourself as your next effort. Have you earned something or received accolades for something you accomplished? Good. Now move on. Get up that next morning with the eye of the tiger, the discipline to create again. 

5.  Become who you are: Think of Michelangelo's David: that massive piece of marble that no one else wanted, that the majority of sculptors shunned for being too foreboding, too difficult, too massive to take a chisel to--but not Michelangelo. To create David, he famously claimed, he had to remove everything that wasn't David from that mass of marble. The story goes that he went at that piece of stone with a vengeance: bleeding from his hands, sweating from his body, his boots left undone for weeks on end, until the sculpture was completed. In this effort, the sculpture of David wasn't the only thing to become--the artist, through the toil, became further himself too. One interpretation of David's gaze in the sculpture is that toward the great Goliath: he faces the beastly cannibal with determination and confidence. This is how we ought to approach the Goliath of our work, ourselves, our failures and success each day.