—Maxim—
When you are on your way, you are already succeeding.
Our infatuation with instant gratification confuses us about success. We want things to happen instantly, and we live in a world where some things happen instantly. But sometimes it seems to take forever for meaningful things to happen. It takes time to make art and it takes time to make an art career. That has always been the case. But it may take more time these days just to get started. And that makes me feel, bitterly and sadly, like I'm not succeeding. The hardest thing about making art, I think, is getting to make it. I feel like I've spent twenty-five years trying to make ends meet so I can afford to make art at all. It sometimes feels like an endless quest to get to point zero.
But I recently learned something about the word success that I think may help to change the way I think about my objectives and the time frame. The word success originally meant to come after (or before, or under, or over, or near to) something else. As the word was used over time, success began to mean reaching a goal that had been set.
Success comes from a succession: something coming before and something coming after. There is no such thing as instant success, because success is the result of a sequence of steps, followed in order. This tells us two things: 1) success takes steps and 2) if you take steps, you are already enjoying some success.
I recently spent a good, long day struggling to conceptualize objectives for my career. I realized that this word, objectives, and others like it—goals, strategies, tasks, mission, etc.—are difficult because they have always been used interchangeably and they tell me nothing about my real desires.
Finally I came up with a formula, which I plugged it into the relational database I'm building to manage my business. In my formula, I set a goal; I make sure that the outcomes of the goal match my creative, professional and financial desires; I come up with some projects for meeting that goal; I define smaller strategies or scopes within the project; and I list the tasks I need to complete for each strategy.
So now I have broken down my desires and my definitions of success so that I can accomplish my goals in smaller bites. And that's really what success means: progress. If you are on your way, you are already succeeding. The movement toward the goal is as important as as meeting the goal.
If there's a one-in-a-hundred chance of getting into a show, then ninety-nine rejections is evidence that you are successfully moving toward a goal—you are taking steps toward a goal and getting very close. Even the IRS will grant you that. So you might as well save your rejection letters because they are evidence of your progress, and evidence that you are doing your work and getting it out there. Tomorrow's rewards are a result of today's work. And today's rewards are a result of yesterday's work.
It helps to change the way we think about success to include the movement toward the goal as well as the goal itself. When you are taking steps toward a goal, you are already succeeding. The goal you set succeeds to the goal you've met. We tend to think that we are experiencing success only after meeting a large goal, and everything up until then is an absence of success. But if we think of success as accomplishing the tasks, strategies, and projects toward our goal, then we can count ourselves successful as we make progress.
