AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING I find myself in a rather interesting situation. Having completed two new releases for 2023 and on the cusp of wrapping up a rather busy last few months with tours, release events, and other matters, I'm now able to step back and see just how successful it all was. Only I'm now having to reconsider the concept of success.
Sometimes we can be so focused on achieving something that in putting our nose to the proverbial grindstone we lose sight of the original intent and while we accomplish the mission we might have gotten a bit askew from our former trajectory. It's always good to take self assessments along the way to better keep us on course and even make any needed changes whenever any challenges arise. That's normal, healthy, and wise. But we also need to take a good hard look at what and where we're at when we reach the end of our goal(s) and do some assessment there.
Accomplishing something is great but it isn't the full nor complete end of the story. Learning where we came up short and how to prevent that in the future is helpful to consider, as well as if achieving the goal really resulted in what we desired as an outcome. And that is where I find myself as I write this post for June. We're reached the halfway mark of the year and I'm doing the normal self assessment with the goals and directions I laid out at the tail end of 2022 and am now looking at what has been produced and what is yet in need of producing... And I'm starting to have some questions...
The biggest question is just what really is success. Now, I'm not talking about the general sense of the word. We all know (or should) that to achieve something is to succeed at something. I'm talking about what does success mean to me in particular and what does it mean for my life and what should I be looking for and putting my efforts and focus on for the rest of the year (and life in general).
Now having had four prose novels and a graphic novel released with the largest publisher I've yet worked with I've been able to experience what many authors (myself included) have longed to experience. And now having experienced it in some ways I've come to see the definition of success I once held in a new light. That isn't to say I'm not thankful for the success I've been able to enjoy—I'm very grateful for it—instead its taking a look at what's transpired and squaring it with reality. And for me that means making sense of what has been achieved and seeing it in the proper light of long term living and present realities to better gauge where I am and need to be.
In some ways getting what you want won't always mean you get what you need. Much of these past few years have seen the lesson of delayed gratification being ingrained again and again into my thinking. Like a crop that comes to full maturity things take time and you can't afford to skip the proper process if you want to have lasting results. Case in point I've been reaping more and more positive results from things that were done (or sowed) back in 2020 (and even later). It certainly took longer in several ways than I would have originally wanted them to unfold but now that they are unfolding things are moving—and in the right trajectory— I'm hopeful for a continually brighter and better future. And yet it isn't entirely the sort of success I originally imagined.
At best, I've seen a partial accomplishment of what I'd like to see transpire thus far in my creative career. Don't get me wrong. I'm very thankful for all I've been blessed with so far and the many and constantly growing number of folks who happen to come across the website, works, and other things. And yet there's still so much more I'd like to and want to—and even need to—get accomplish and with sometimes less hours in the day in which to undertake it. And that brings me back full circle to what it means to be successful. And for now it seems success is less about a destination or checklist of accomplishments (though it is always good to have goals to achieve) and more about the journey itself—learning and improving from it to ascend (and hopefully enjoy) even more.
You can think of it like steps ascending a mountain. The ultimate prize is reaching the mountain's summit—a life goal, if you will—climbing each step therefore is a success in that it brings you closer to that ultimate goal. The change (and challenge) for me at this time is learning to see each step amid the larger scheme of things and enjoying more of the process instead of the destination. In the end the ultimate measure of something is the totality of its existence. That is how someone finishes is more important in many ways than how they started. So I intend to finish strong and that means climbing each step one after the other, assessing my progress to make sure I stay focused on the main objective, but also learning to better enjoy the view(s) and experience(s) along the way.