If you’re a writer on Medium, you probably know the feeling. Your deeply-researched, beautifully polishes article accrues a couple measly views, while views spike and the earnings roll in for the lazy piece you flicked off in half an hour.
You probably try to figure out what you did wrong and right, and you might figure out a couple tips and tricks, but on the whole, the problem is that success on the platform has more to do with the luck of the draw than the value of what you’ve written.
It isn’t just Medium. What makes one song top the charts and another languish in obscurity? Anyone who’s ever listened to the radio will pretty much be able to admit that sheer quality isn’t the main factor: the radio isn’t supposed to be a collection of ‘the best that music has to offer’.
As much as we’d like to think that life will award us gold stars when we do a good job, whether we get a gold star or not often depends a lot more on whether we happen to be standing near someone with a gold star to give away than whether or not we deserve it.
When I was younger and anxious to see signs of my desirability, I’d often find that it was on days that I felt the most unattractive that more men would give me looks or chat me up. I tried to analyze this data because I assumed that the reactions I received were tantamount to an objective score of what I’d presented to the world. I didn’t consider that the men who didn’t give me second glances might be married, gay, or shy, or that the men who approached me were going to approach any girl they happened to come across that day. I assumed there was a perfect correlation between my appearance and how people looked at me, which just wasn’t true.
There isn’t a perfect correlation between quality and success. Success, by definition, is what happens to us, what happens to our efforts when they’re out of our hands. It doesn’t necessarily happen fairly, even in situations that call for justice. An infamous study suggested that judges give harsher sentences when they are hungry. A high school teacher marked me wrong when I identified a Shakespeare play as ‘As You Like It’ while marking a friend right for ‘Do You Like It’.
More often it doesn’t involve specific acts of injustice but a longer pattern of luck or misfortune. I once met a piercingly intelligent homeless man who was able to explain difficult mathematical concepts with total clarity — to the volunteers at the soup kitchen. Meanwhile, people who partied their way through college hold down six-figure jobs that involve little more than showing up and smiling.
Intelligence doesn’t guarantee success. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success. A job well done doesn’t guarantee success.
Only success guarantees success.
Because success is (in most cases) a kind of lottery, if you want to be successful, the key is giving yourself a lot of chances. Putting your name up for consideration, submitting your work, applying for jobs, taking risks. It might be about being in the right place at the right time, but that means you have to spend a lot of time in the right places.
When I look back on my life, the work I’m proudest of is work I was never compensated for. (And I was compensated for plenty of things that were more or less worthless). There’s an arbitrariness to what works which, while it can feel unfair, I can also find freeing.
It means that you can put your heart and soul into the things that really matter to you without worrying if it’ll sell. You’re free to be a craftsman, to aim for internal perfection, to put your best work into it, to play around and take your time and hone your skills without ever conflating your achievements with their reception. Whether it’s a flop or a smash hit, it doesn’t say anything about what they are or who you are; it just means that you were lucky or unlucky. Because success isn’t the test of quality.
Only quality is the test of quality.
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Previously published on medium
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