There is No Fuzziness in Success or Failure
There is no fuzziness between success and–I hate to say the word but–failure. The precise form of a goal’s outline is as sharp as a child’s drawing, where the silhouette is three times darker than the shaded coloring of the interior. We call that ‘drawing within the lines’ because those lines are so preponderous that there is no way not to spill over as one image is separated from the other. This is my view of life, success, work, family. It is an image that shows clear and divided parameters. And in the case of your career, there is one well-encased object called success on one side of the drawing paper, and, at the other extreme, on the other side of the paper, there is failure, and–guess what?–there is no space between the black lines of the profit side and the red lines of the failure side. They connect. There is no room in the middle. It is either/or. We like to think there is a gray area, but you can’t measure gray. It just varies willy-nilly. Bright black is evident. Bright red is clear. Profit (black) is clear. Loss (red) is apparent. Those are the only two colors that are defined. Again, there is no gray in between.
So, what makes all the difference? Again, it is as polar as the two images of good and evil, light and dark, black and white, left and right. On one side are great ideas. On the other side is excellent execution. On one side is imaginative and entrepreneurial energy. On the other side is strict management. All of these, all of life, play off each other like poles of a magnet, positive and negative, up and down.
Creating a successful and profitable career, life, or family requires difficult choices. It requires tenacity to stay on track. To be successful means leaving the comfort of security and betting on risk. Opposites again: security on the one side and, on the other side, risk. With this risk, one must be light-footed. The opposite of tenacity is the God-given ability many do not take, which is to abandon what is not working quickly.
It is easy for writers and artists to think they are doing something when they do the opposite: nothing. So, what is an artist to do? Like any other businessperson, an artist needs access to polar data and success or failure data so that the artist can keep herself and her team focused on the same result. How? Because data, which is something concrete beyond the subjective value of a story, tells the artist, the writer, and the businessperson the essence of definite success or failure. It does that, as data does, by always having a quantifiable number. All successful and pitiful businesses are the same, but they are all different in their data. A writer’s data, being a specific number, is how many hours the writer writes each day, how many words, how many copies will be sold, or how specific the advance we are working towards is.
The main reason that I see writers and artists fail or suffer from lackluster careers is not because of talent (or lack of) but rather because of a lack of knowing the numbers and the time (a number) that it will take to reach that number, and then using the data of numbers to understand the benchmarks of whether specific actions are moving towards or away from the number. The bottom line is that everyone, every minute of the day, is either getting better or worse. There is no gray area in the middle. It is, every minute, better or worse. The ball is in the air, either climbing or falling. There is no in-between.
So, instead of subjective goals such as writing a great novel or finding a great idea or agent, look for goals with data—these measure where you are on life’s graph. If you do not have an ultimate literal number, you do not have a goal and cannot measure your steps or progress. Argue, if you must, but all success starts and ends with a literal number. There is no fuzziness in success or failure.
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