Becoming A Household Name is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Success is doing what you want to do on your terms. Some people define it slightly differently as doing what I want with who I want when I want.The dictionary defines success in the following ways: noun - a favorable or desired outcome / the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence / the accomplishment of an aim or purpose / the accomplishment of one's goals.At its most basic level, you can view success as hearing my voice. You pulled up your podcast app, found my broadcast, and played this episode. I prefer Spotify. You might prefer Apple or Podbean, but the fact that you are listening to this episode means you had success.This is important, because in the broader sense, we all define success subjectively. Your success would not be your significant other's success or your brother's success or your daughter's success, though you may have shared successes where desires overlap. If fidelity is a marker of success for you, and your significant other value monogamy, you share that success when you limit your romantic interactions to one another, however even within that overlapping success, you'll define success subjectively.You might hold the opinion that viewing images of naked people does not violate monogamy while your significant other might view reading romance novels as acceptable, and in both cases, one of you is finding arousal from projections outside of each other.You might find it romantic when your significant other surprises you with a clean house when you return from work, and your significant other might find a gift of flowers romantic, but if you receive flowers, it might seem like extra work and a waste of money.And before we dive into the broader subject, let's examine one more angle to success. Success is being true to yourself. Yes, that's another way of phrasing the original definition: doing what you want on your terms.The reason it's important to belabor this is because when me get into the murky middle, we're going to have an unbelievable hard time translating information in useful ways so we can orient ourselves to success.To make the point, let me tell you a story:You define success as having intimacy with your significant other, and you know about yourself that it's effective to get you in an intimate mood to receive flowers from your partner, but one day your significant other comes home without flowers and yet tries to romance you by completing a chore around the house.You decide to read a little steamy romance while your significant other is cleaning, because you want to be in the mood, but the book gets you all hot and bothered, and you tease out a blustering curtains so that when it's time for a little pillow talk, you're not really in the mood, but you definitely feel you can help satisfy your significant other's desire because your significant other did something nice for you.Meanwhile, your significant other defines success as bringing you to the curtains blustering moment, but since you already popped, you have to act blustered when in fact you aren't.Becoming A Household Name is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.You conclude your bedroom time and tell yourself everything was magical and everyone is happy, but you feel strangely dissatisfied, and your no telepath, but you feel your significant other is perhaps just a little let down too.At that moment, you have choices: redefine success, blame your significant other for failing to meet your needs, or take responsibility for what you did that led to failure.If you choose options one or two, you fit nicely in the majority, and if you're in the majority, you probably doubled down and chose both options. You blamed your significant other, then decided that if they were at fault, you'd have to redefine success so you could get what you want.Maybe this example will ring true to you in another scenario.Let's say you woke up with a dream to be the next Ernest Hemingway. That awakening happened after you read "Hills Like White Elephants."You recognized the power of the story, its subtlety, its character depth, its tension, stakes, and implications, and from that awakening you committed yourself to writing a story that would speak to readers the way that story spoke to you.But when you set out to make that dream a success, you began to realize "Hills Like White Elephants" is deceptively simple.You write a few stories, and they all fall flat. In this choose your own adventure you can blame Hemingway for deceiving you and jettison your goal to be his heir or you can redefine your interpretation of the goal. But either way, you fail to achieve your first vision of success.The third option, one very few people take, is to accept responsibility for your shortcomings and turn back to the page to write ...
