I Stopped Caring About Results (And Started Getting Them)
The week after my first book came out in 2012 was rough.
I mean, it wasn’t actually rough. I was twenty five. My rent was $900 a month for a beautiful two room apartment in the Garden District in New Orleans. I was with the girl I would eventually marry and I’d just put out my first book.
I should have felt like everything was amazing.
Instead I was in almost debilitating physical and emotional pain…and it was all self-inflicted.
Traditionally books come out on Tuesdays and first week sales account for all pre-orders plus whatever comes in between launch and that coming Sunday. And then, you don’t find out whether you landed on the New York Times bestseller lists until late in the day on Wednesday. In those days, there was another equally important list—put out by the Wall Street Journal—that was made public sometime on Friday.
I’d actually had a great sales week—and great media coverage too—but that middle period of the waiting, that was the reason I was in pain. I was torturing myself in anxiety and anticipation (and alternatively dread) about whether I would make it or not. I’ve said before, but with that first book, Trust Me I’m Lying, I was probably 10% proud of what I’d done and 90% waiting for this news to decide whether I had succeeded or failed. Years of my life had gone into it, I was already so blessed—I got to do my dream, publish a book!—and yet it all hung on how a group of faceless gatekeepers decided to evaluate the numbers that week (because, like so many things in life, even objective sales numbers are not actually objective).
In short, I was doing the exact opposite of what the Stoics teach. I had attached my identity, my happiness, my pride to something I did not control.
So of course I was miserable!
And of course, I was crushed when I didn’t hit the Times list…and only moderately relieved when good news came about WSJ two days later.
I’ll tell you, I’m not proud of how I acted in that interminable waiting period (according to my wife, I was awful to be around). But I am proud of how far I’ve come since then.
I don’t mean I’m proud that I’ve hit the lists a bunch since then (I have) but…that is no longer something I think much about.
I once read a letter where the great Cheryl Strayed kindly pointed out to a young writer the distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is all the things that are entirely in your control—the work, the hours at the desk, the ideas you wrestle onto the page. Publishing is all the things that are not entirely in your control—acceptance and rejection letters, the size of your advance, the sales numbers, the bestseller lists, the reviews, the invitations, awards, how it lands with readers, whether bookstores stock it, press bookings.
It’s not that the publishing stuff is not important, it’s just that in focusing on them, people often ignore the basic things that precede them—the stuff that it is impossible to succeed without.
And this is true in all domains.
Look, from the outside, it probably seems like people like Tom Brady are obsessed with winning. You see them breaking the tablet on the sidelines when the game is going poorly or you hear about how famously competitive they are and this makes sense. Obviously to win that much you have to really care about winning, right?
What Tom Brady’s actually obsessed with, he has said, is trying “to get a little bit better each day.”
He wanted to improve the accuracy of his throws a little bit. He wanted to get the ball out a little bit faster. He wanted to make his reads a little bit better. He wanted to be a little bit better as a leader. He wanted to recover after games a little bit faster. Because it’s getting a little bit better every day, compounded over a long enough time, that leads to results.
It’s the same distinction as writing vs publishing. Brady’s obsessed with performance—his performance—and that translated into a lot of Super Bowl victories.
As I’ve locked more into writing and tuned out publishing, more on the parts in my control than the parts outside my control, the funny thing is that my results have gotten better the more I have flipped this ratio.
It’s a strange paradox. That you could get results by not thinking about them?
I think this is because the fixation on externals, on things outside your control—whether winning a championship, hitting a bestseller list, or making [$$$,$$$$$,$$$$]—carries a hidden cost. It consumes a significant amount of time and energy that would be better spent doing things that actually generate those results. A musician chasing a spot on the charts churns out derivative work, never finding their unique sound. A speaker fixated on the audience’s reaction loses their train of thought. A swimmer who glances over at the competition or up at the finish creates drag and slows down. Have you ever golfed? You know what happens when you pull your head up to follow the ball.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to accomplish great things or to do and be all that you’re capable of—you definitely should. Obviously external results do matter to a degree. If my books stopped selling, my publisher would stop publishing them.
I’m just saying you need to make sure you’re running the right race.
Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.” The bestseller list? That’s up to the New York Times. Winning a Grammy? That’s up for the Recording Academy. A Nobel Prize? That’s up to the folks in Stockholm. Even competitive goals like being the fastest person in a race or the richest person in the world—these depend on what your competitors do.
What is in your control is showing up, giving maximum effort, following your training, sticking to your principles, pursuing your calling. If that translates to on the field success, great—in fact, it almost always does. If that translates into career recognition, awesome—and again, it usually does.
Many great artists have talked about this—this paradoxical way results tend to be an accidental byproduct, coming to those who don’t directly pursue them. The comedian Mike Myers once said this was his advice for young creators: “Don’t want to be famous…fame is the industrial disease of creativity. It’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.” Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden would say in an interview, “I’m not interested in being famous. Fame is the excrement of creativity, it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it.” And Viktor Frankl would talk about how “strange and remarkable” it was that Man’s Search For Meaning became such a success because he wrote it not to “build up any reputation on the part of the author.” After the book sold millions of copies, Frankl shared what that taught him: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication.”
Perhaps this is what Eugen Herrigel is talking about in Zen in the Art of Archery. The more you’re aiming, the less you’re focused on your form, the more distracted you are, the more tense you are. Your willful will causes you to miss.
One night just last week, the week after Wisdom Takes Work came out, I was hanging out with my kids when I glanced at the home screen of my phone and could see there was a text from my agent, Steve. I knew what that text was probably about…so I ignored it.
The next morning, after I got my boys to school and went for a run, I was sitting in the anteroom, going over some letters I am reading for my next book. Remembering that Steve was catching a flight out of the country later that day, I called him back. He told me the good news: Wisdom Takes Work debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list, and is on pace to be the best selling book in the Four Virtues Series.
“That’s incredible,” I said. “Now, I’m going to get back to work.”
Don’t get me wrong—I’m deeply grateful to the readers who got the book on the bestseller list. It’s crazy and humbling. In fact, to the extent I do think about a book’s success anymore, it’s the readers I think about. They not only give me the satisfaction of knowing the work is having an impact, but they give me the great fortune of being indifferent to things like bestseller lists—their trust and support matters more.
In Perennial Seller, I quote Stefan Zweig, “I had acquired what, to my mind, is the most valuable success a writer can have—a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who looked forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint.”
In that sense, I was pleased to hear the news that Wisdom hit the bestseller list. I took it to mean that I built that following. It also meant, though, that they trusted me and I had to do my best as a writer to live up to that. I didn’t owe anyone or anything to anyone else. There wasn’t anything else to focus on but that work, which is what I meant when I told Steve I was getting back to the pages in front of me.
Compared to that nervous, anxious, desperate twenty-five year old waiting for good news almost fifteen years ago, I had come a long way. The news hardly changed my opinion about the work I had done…and it didn’t change what I knew about the work I still had to do.
The idea is that you enjoy the process, the part that’s up to you.
This sets you up for good results and it also means that when you’re fortunate enough to get them, they are extra as opposed to validation.
As they should be.
