Why successful writers are doing more than you (and me)

Let’s face it; it’s hard not to compare ourselves with others. On the ladder of success, there are going to be plenty of people above you, and believe me the view isn’t pretty. They’re more accomplished, hotter, better connected.

I’ve been wrestling with this knowledge all my life. I know that, no matter how much writing I did today, one of my favorite authors, Stephen King, had written more, and better. How can I compete against a guy who wrote great books drunk and high than I could sober? One novel, “Cujo,” he barely remembers writing.

(The photo of King, BTW, came from Larry Fine’s website. The story behind the photo is not explained.)

When he was my age, he had been hit by a van, nearly died and heavily medicated, and I’ll bet even then he was still out-producing me.

How can I compete against that?

Turns out I was screwed from the start, and most of us are. Even if we wish we were as productive, or as talented, or simply producing work, or as hung as Liam Neeson, it might help to know that by simply thinking about it, we’re revealing ourselves as having greater obstacles to success than the people who have already made it.

I’ll repeat that (except for the Neeson bit; that’s just a personal obsession): If you’re thinking about why you’re not a success, it’s because you’re thinking about why you’re not a success.

In other words, self-reflective people, people who think about things, start farther behind the success curve as people who don’t think about such things.

I admit, it’s hard to wrap your head around that. How can people not think about their work? How can they not be so self-aware?

But it’s true, and there’s a contradiction embedded in that statement. I claim to be empathetic to how other people think, but I run up against a limit, that I can’t understand those people who can’t see themselves. How can’t they, I think, they’re there!

We have Harry Stein to thank for that observation. The columnist and author was conducting research for a series of articles called “The Wisdom of Our Elders.” He approached a number of people who were at least 75 years old and pick their brains about the big questions of life. Questions like what was important, how could you avoid mistakes, was was true success.

He conducted about a dozen interviews, and abandoned the project, because he discovered something about the wisdom of our elders: they didn’t know shit about wisdom.

Visiting the law office of gentlemanly former Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright — renowned in his day as one of the most astute foreign policy minds going, mentor to the young Bill Clinton — I found a tart-tongued old man still unaccountably nursing grudges with adversaries almost no one else even remembered. A few weeks later I spent a morning on a sun-drenched Hollywood Hills patio with the legendary film producer Hal Roach, nearly a hundred years old at the time but still fully lucid, listening to his experiences with Will Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Our Gang kids. He said some fascinating things, yet trying to get him to draw any sort of larger lesson from it all proved useless. Totally defined by his work, he told me he didn’t think about it, he just did it.

And so it was with most of the others.

So what can you do? You can’t turn off the thinking, but you can understand that when it comes to working on a project, the last thing you need to do is think too much about it. It’s unproductive.

And if you want to know how to defeat then, let’s look at that next time.

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