Success

In which we seek nuance, fame, immortality and other small things

Dec 04, 2023

I checked in on Substack Notes a few days ago… Bad idea. As Notes trundles along the ‘I wanna be a social media platform’ route, there was drama, and that drama was amplified.

The reason? An essay about success on Substack that many people liked and others felt attacked by. I’m not going to tag anyone; even simply observing the engagement-driven explosion from my little solitary island far, far away was exhausting, and the people involved deserve rest and peace.

In short:

Team A: you can’t expect success writing on Substack (or anywhere else) without hard work. (In whatever way you define success. On Substack, it will likely be finding your audience, having a solid subscriber base, and so on.)

Team B: how dare you? I’ve been working hard and don’t have the tens of thousands of subscribers you have. It’s all just luck and connections.

It’s an old debate, really, and one that extends far beyond Substack.

Both teams are right. Let’s add a little nuance to see how.

Team A never claimed that hard work is the only thing that matters. But, if your hard writing work does not find its audience, it languishes. Luck and/or connections are great tools for discovery and amplification and they can be the difference between a dead essay or a viral one. Quality alone is rarely enough.

For example, being part of Substack’s checkmark club might make it more likely that your posts get pushed into other people’s feeds. (I say ‘might’ because the Substack recommendation algorithm is a mystery to me. Still, it stands to reason that it is driven by engagement.)

Team B never claimed that hard work isn’t part of the game. But it’s all too easy not to see the hard work, breakdowns, and endless toil behind others’ success. Often, years of hard work help people build connections and increase their opportunities for a lucky break — the more quality work you put out, the more likely it is to get picked up.

Example? People who seem to skyrocket to Substack success often have built expertise or an audience elsewhere through years of work.

The tricky part, the root of the (sometimes vociferous) debate, is that the work/luck distribution is unique to the person and their conditions. Some people get incredibly lucky early in their writing journey while others are immensely talented and hardworking but will never catch a lucky break.

This is why all those ‘Ten Rules to be Successful’ posts/books/courses are (almost?) always a bunch of marketing nonsense tailored to separate you from your hard-earned cash.

Talent is the final piece of the puzzle and perhaps the most intangible. In On Writing, Stephen King writes:

… it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

Hard work can certainly improve your writing. It can even make you a good writer, but to be truly great, to be a truly singular writer, we cannot discard the role of innate talent. What such a talent looks like for a writer is hard to say. An instinct for storytelling, perhaps. A facility for language or the uncanny gift for picking up the unspoken tales that capture the Zeitgeist. While talent is never a guarantee, it may help you get noticed. Cue snowball effect.

The sobering conclusion: there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for success. It would be nice if there was. Add all the elements, mix them up, shake it a little bit, and - kapow - on to the stratospheric heights of writing’s Mount Olympus. Move over Zeus, here I come with ink-dipped quills.

Reality doesn’t work that way. Some people get lucky, some people outwork everyone, and some people are disproportionately privileged, whether it’s by family fortune, well-connected friends, or innate ability. This is why trying to emulate someone else’s success 1:1 is bound to fail. In the words of the philosopher Bruce Lee:

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

Success - in whatever way you choose to define it, in writing or anything else - is a confluence of conditions. Some of those conditions (hard work, learning, incorporating valuable feedback) are under your control, others aren’t (the family you’re born in, luck, innate talent).

And, of course, whenever you reach any benchmark or goalpost, you aim for another and feel like a failure all over again.

Audrey Hepburn is always a good source for an incisive and pithy quote: