The struggle to find success

Are you successful? It depends on what you consider success. Is it making a lot of money? Is it fame? Is it getting accolades and praise from your peers?

We tend to judge our success based on what others think success is. We like to look at social media and the glamorous images of so-called successful artists and think that those images define success. Not that it is bad to desire those things. Absolutely not! If your desire is to be a multi-platinum singer with millions of fans worldwide, then go for it! Go get your idea of success! However, I do believe that it can be a little shortsighted if that is your only metric for success. What if you have hundreds of thousands of fans? Is that not a success? What if you have tens of thousands? What if you end up being platinum instead of multi-platinum?

Having lofty goals and expectations for yourself isn't a bad thing. It's actually really good to set your goals high. But if for whatever reason you aren't able to achieve the heights of the goal(s) then are you a failure? 

People often think that the opposite of success is failure. It's not. It is a part of it. Success and failure work hand and hand. Failure is the best teacher an artist could ask for. Anyone that you would deem successful probably has more accumulative failures than successes. I have a line in my series Broke Boys that I probably stole from someone more brilliant than me. It says, "Every failure is a brick that builds the road to success". 

Does that mean we should just accept failure? Hell no! It just means that we shouldn't let our failures stop us from pursuing our success. And embrace them as opportunities to learn, grow, and become stronger/better as we keep pushing toward our goals. 

But another problem that we often deal with is not considering all of the success that we already have. All of the accomplishments that we've achieved, the people that we've inspired along the way, etc... Like in my earlier point, are we going to disregard the fans that we do have because it's not as much as we desired? Are we going to throw out the work that we've done because it's not as great as the work we will create in the future? Throw out any money we have made because it's not the amount that we strived for? 

I'm not even going to answer that. 

Define what success is to you and go after it, but don't discredit the fact that if you've achieved or accomplished anything. Made anything. Inspired anyone. You're already a successful badass who is just getting started.