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The thing about success is that it messes with your brain. It messes with other people’s brains, too.
I’m not saying that it gives you amnesia, but it does change how you see yourself and the events that lead you to where you are. Basically, we start to tell ourselves stories about how it happened and why it happened–specifically, why it happened for us. And if what you did was public, then other people start to do the very same thing.
I’ll give you a story from my own life.
In 2012, I made an abrupt and dramatic turn in my life. I walked away from the marketing world and wrote a book about Stoicism called The Obstacle Is The Way. A book that, against all odds, hit the bestseller list and went on to sell millions of copies. It’s landed in the hands of CEOs, athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, and so many others. Since then, I’ve written 13 more books, 10 of which are about Stoicism. I spotted a nascent trend and turned it into an international phenomenon, reaching people all over the planet and bringing this obscure, ancient philosophy into the halls of power, boardrooms, Hollywood and professional locker rooms.
It’s a nice thought and it certainly doesn’t hurt my feelings that people are inclined to give me credit for planning and orchestrating the whole thing.
The problem is that it’s not true! No matter how many trend pieces or fans repeat it.
In fact, if I had even once expressed the slightest notion that Stoicism–or Daily Stoic–was going to be this popular, I should have been legally banned from writing Ego Is The Enemy.
The reality is much simpler: I was excited about Stoicism. There was a book I wanted to write. I hoped it would do well, but I didn’t know. Neither did my publisher, although I’m sure the industry is inclined to give them credit too because my editor would tell me later that they were hoping I'd get over Stoicism and go back to marketing books. I found out later that someone I thought was a friend in the industry was privately predicting Obstacle would sell maybe 5,000 copies.
It was nowhere near a sure thing.
It’s funny how a success story can warp something as objective as the order of the books I’ve published. The great David Maraniss would write “myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.” The actual order is that I wrote one marketing book (Trust Me I’m Lying) and very shortly after that came out–before we even knew how well Trust Me I’m Lying would sell–I sold the proposal for The Obstacle Is The Way. Then, while I was working on Obstacle, I wrote an ebook called Growth Hacker Marketing, which came out before Obstacle. But on paper, it looks like I did two successful marketing books and then gambled it all to write about Stoicism. Again, this is not true!
It wasn’t even a gamble! I kept my day job at American Apparel the whole time.
Nor was Obstacle some overnight hit. It came out in 2014 and did OK. It took five years to hit a national bestseller list. Shortly after the release, Tim Ferriss published the audiobook and told his audience about me (something I couldn’t have predicted until after I wrote it). We did a discounted promotion on the ebook during its first year out and Amazon kept the discounted price for something like the next 11 months. It was from this that it slowly, steadily acquired its audience.
Did I sense a huge trend? Or did I write a good book and catch a couple of lucky breaks?
What story I tell myself doesn’t change what happened in the past, but it does change how I regard myself now–it has the potential to change how I’ll act in the future.
The lesson I take from the success of my books is not that I’m a genius. It’s not that I can predict trends. It’s that following what you’re excited about is the best strategy (because I would have enjoyed the experience even if the book didn’t sell). It’s that trying experimental marketing ideas, like doing a BookBub and Amazon Goldbox deal (as unglamorous as that may sound) can pay off big-time. It’s that success usually takes longer than you expect, but after it happens, all that time disappears. It’s that by writing multiple books, instead of resting on my laurels, I put myself in a position to get lucky and stay busy.
Again, if I had known that this obscure school of ancient philosophy had the potential to sell so many copies, I would have self-published The Obstacle Is The Way. I would have fought for a much bigger advance on The Daily Stoic. I wasn’t thinking about the upside at the time…I was just happy to get paid at all!
Stories aren’t just dishonest. They can be dangerously misleading.
In Ego Is The Enemy, I write about a talk I had seen where one of Google’s founders explained, inspiringly to a crowd, that the way he judges prospective companies and entrepreneurs is by asking them “if they’re going to change the world.”
Which is fine, except that’s not how Google started. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two Stanford PhDs working on their dissertations. It’s also not how YouTube started, whose founders weren’t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips. Among their earliest ideas for the platform was to treat it like a dating site. Not to mention that Google didn’t even start YouTube, one of their most valuable properties. They bought it.
What followed in the mid-to-late aughts was Google repeatedly overreaching on a bunch of bold ‘disruptive’ product ideas that went nowhere. Google Pages was a flop. Google Glass was a flop. Google Plus was a flop. These were huge bets that were actually largely outside Google’s core competence but fit nicely with the ‘change the world’ narrative they had convinced themselves of.
The investor Paul Graham (who funded Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, and others) explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on. Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world—that’s where the money is. He wants them to have “frighteningly ambitious” ideas, but explains: “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.” He’s saying you don’t make a frontal attack out of ego; instead, you start with a small bet and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go.
His other famous piece of advice: “Keep your identity small,” fits well here. Make it about the work and the principles behind it—not about a glorious, aggrandizing vision.
Resisting the urge to tell yourself stories, to stay focused on what’s in front of you, not to be distracted by the glimmer of that glowing future you’ve painted in your mind–this is a difficult discipline. We want so desperately to believe that those who have great empires set out to build one. Why? So we can indulge in the pleasurable planning of our own. So we can take full credit for the good that happens and the riches and respect that come our way.
Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen. Of course, you didn’t really know all along—or if you did, it was more faith than knowledge.
But who wants to remember all the times you doubted yourself?
The twentieth century financier Bernard Baruch had a great line: “Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can’t be done—except by liars.” That is, people’s claims about what they’re doing in the market are rarely to be trusted.
Most stories are lies.
Most narratives leave the important things out.
I’m probably even getting some stuff wrong in this post! (It’s a story isn’t it?)
Most labels obscure too–filmmaker, writer, investor, entrepreneur, executive. These are nouns. But what gets someone to that position? Verbs.
We must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from our understanding of other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened.
Instead of pretending that we are living some great story, we must remain focused on the execution—and on executing with excellence. We must defer the credit or crown and continue working on what got us here. Because that’s the only thing that will keep us here.
And whenever we can, we should acknowledge our lucky breaks. There were always more of them than we are inclined to admit.
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