I Guess It Is Simply Luck
A friend of mine told me I was lucky. We went to college together as undergraduates, majoring in music composition and arrangement. His goal was to become famous, and he wanted people to remember him three hundred years from now (his words). My goal was to make a living; whatever else came was fine. He now teaches music in a high school. I’m doing what I’m doing. I asked him about his writing. He said with all the papers to grade, he never had time. I get it. Teaching is an endless job. He didn’t indicate he’d written anything at all recently. I watched him as he stared blankly off into the distance. I didn’t ask, but I wondered what he saw.
He was and is correct. I have been lucky, and I have been blessed—no doubt about that. But I sometimes wonder if luck isn’t like a trip flowing down a Southern creek, fast flowing at times, slow-moving at others, but always with places to get off if one only wants to make an effort to paddle to the shore. Some stops are not that glamorous. I’ve worked on productions that were nothing short of embarrassments but learned from them. Other opportunities made a big difference. The problem was that I never knew which projects would turn out successful. I just did them. I was scared of doing some of the things I did, fearful of making a fool of myself, but I did them anyway. Sometimes I was a fool. And I, according to my friend, became lucky.
As a business owner now, I have people coming to me looking for jobs. Most, I can’t afford because many straight out of school are wanting to be the CEO with the CEO’s salary. Me? I remember working on many early jobs with no more payment than access to an all-I-could-eat food truck. I guess I worked for food. The jobs weren’t much. Many of them didn’t even give me credit in the roll at the end of the film, but I got the experience, got to add it to my resume. One thing built on the next, and I guess I got lucky.
All my life, I’ve worked with agents. As my agents retired or left the business, I sometimes felt I couldn’t even buy one. But I kept rowing my boat to shore, asking about opportunities, and at some of the stops, I found what I needed. At other stops, people told me I wasn’t good enough. I think they were right. The rejection helped me grow. I’ve got a great agent. The best. It took time to find him. I guess I just got lucky.
As I think about this analogy, my mind highlights the stops I made along this Southern creek. What I’m failing to mention, though, is what I was doing as I flowed in the channel. I rowed. As I reflect on it, what I was doing by rowing may have been just as important—and still just as important—as the stops along the way that got noticed by others. The disembarkments, the opportunities, it seems, all followed what I happened to be doing prior, the private rowing on my own, even the stops that were a big mistake but proved not to be mistakes after all. Every stop made me better. Every rowing pass made me better as I reflected and perfected my strokes. More importantly, maybe, too, I was always—and still am—enjoying the journey. Every new day is something new to see and do. I think Huck Finn would be proud, and so would Jim. They took that journey on that Southern waterway, and, like me, they came out different in the end. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. I guess we’re just lucky.
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