If the most financially and critically successful artists don’t feel successful, maybe there’s something wrong with how we think about success.
success
When Accepting Support Feels Like Becoming a Burden
When Ijeoma Oluo offers to buy her aging white mother a home, her mother worries she’s become a burden.
In My Own Voice, Redefining Success and Failure
In this personal essay, Lauren DePino looks back at her ambitions as a singer, and re-evaluates the rejections she once allowed to define her.
In My Own Voice, Redefining Success and Failure
Lauren DePino looks back at her ambitions as a singer, and re-evaluates the rejections she once allowed to define her.
In My Own Voice, Redefining Success and Failure
Lauren DePino looks back at her ambitions as a singer, and re-evaluates the rejections she once allowed to define her.
Tennessee Williams’ Catastrophe of Success
Fame turned the playwright into a “public Somebody” overnight — a crisis that landed him in the hospital.
‘Two-Thirds of Publishing Is About Failure’
My boss when I worked in London—someone who’d published Booker Prize winners, remember—used to say that two-thirds of publishing is about failure. I agree with that: it’s the nature of the business. And yet publishing is an industry that keeps attracting to it, in various ways, people who want it to be two-thirds about success. […]
John Lennon on What Made the Beatles Successful
“‘We thought we were the best in Hamburg and Liverpool—it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on. We were the best fucking group in the goddamn world … and believing that is what made us what we were.’” -John Lennon, in a 1980 interview. Lennon is quoted in Andrew Romano’s 2013 […]