Viva La Opportunidad!
My old friend Jones wants more than anything to be recognized as a literary genius. To be a best selling but estranged author, living reluctantly in a spotlight he secretly thrives on. The world would speculate on his ever-changing sexual preference while the publishing industry could care less, given his momentous book sales. This is Jones’ dream. And until that day comes, Jones struggles to hold a job because he feels that he’s above anything too commercial and doesn’t see the value in doing anything other than writing. When I ask him what he’s doing to promote his writing, he tells me that his writing should sell itself. I deeply fear for Jones.
As a counterpoint to Jones, a colleague of mine bet his best friend at the pub that he could write anything and get it published. The result was a successful book series that has recently been optioned for a film. This colleague of mine still works in marketing, is as down to earth as Buddha and probably knows more about marketing books than his publisher does. Jones hates my colleague.
Why do some make it while others don’t?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to why some people are able to turn their daydreams into wild success stories, while others struggle to get theirs off the ground. What’s the difference between Jones who writes full-time and my colleague from work who makes writing look like a hobby? As I look around me, the expected patterns of “did well in school” and “worked themselves into a breakdown” don’t seem to hold up. In fact, it makes me wonder if these are ingredients for an antiquated definition of success. After all, the generation of people who are in their twenties today, have seen people make their success happen (and in a huge way), on their own terms. We’ve watched the dot com boom and bust spectacularly and learned an important lesson: that there’s plenty of success to be had out there on your own terms, even as a college drop out.
Don’t get me wrong, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, there’s plenty of room for hard workers with brilliant educations. All I’m saying is that if the success you’re after is about forging your own path, there seems to be more to it than that. And it’s not just about being good at one or two of these skills. I know plenty of cool hunters who can occasionally point out an interesting trend for their clients to capitalize off of. I don’t know any who have ever taken an opportunity and turned it into a business for themselves. I know lots of people who design products but have only heard of a couple who have made a name for themselves selling their own products. So an eye for opportunity clearly isn’t enough. It’s the ability to recognize it, land it and grow it that makes some people better with opportunity than others.
Make it happen for yourself
At my last job, I was fortunate enough to meet Preethi Nair. She quit her job as a management consultant to pursue her dream of writing a novel. Upon realizing nobody was going to publish the book for her, Preethi decided to take fate into her own hands. She knew what it took to get a book published and decided she could do it all herself. She needed a publishing company so she created one herself. She needed publicity so she invented a publicist who was really just Preethi operating under a pseudonym. In the end, Preethi’s first book became a success, entirely on her own efforts. Since then, she’s signed a deal with a publisher on her own terms and now has three books with some impressive sales.
Why the means are just as important as the end
Having talent simply isn’t enough. Ideas, however brilliant, do not sell themselves. While Preethi is a brilliant novelist, the reason we’ve heard of her is because she also has a razor sharp commercial mind, a healthy sense of self-belief in her abilities when hurdles arise and the tenacity to see things through once she has her eye on a particular prize. Maybe it’s some innate entrepreneurial spirit but without it, she’d never have been able to build her writing opportunity, merchandise it and make it a success.
Not selling out, but selling on your terms
Now, I realize words like “merchandise” and “commercial” may have tripped some of your sell-out alarms but I’m not sure that selling out is the right phrase to use here. I’d say you could look at selling in a number of ways - from gauging interest in your work to how you measure your progress towards an end goal of wealth and fame (if that’s your bag). But in the end, most of us will need to sell something to someone, in order to succeed. And with that in mind, selling out only means selling on terms that aren’t your own. Besides, if you get too precious, most icons throughout history are sell-outs (think Michelangelo, the Medicis, and the big FU known as the Sistine Chapel).
Deep down, I like to think that there’s an opportunist in everybody. There’s even hope for Jones, but that would involve his adoption of a different approach to the opportunities around him. If he were a bit more open minded when it came to thinking about where opportunities may lie, he’d see the value in being a publisher’s assistant and sneaking her a manuscript from time to time. If he spent a bit more time merchandizing his work into something a publisher could conceivably sell, hell, if he made even the most modest attempt to sell his work, he might actually achieve his dream of resenting his own success. And in the case of this rising star, he might actually enjoy it.
