I’d like to point out your mistake. As Sean McGuire from Good Will Hunting said, “It’s not your fault.” And, 99% of the time, it isn’t your fault. What I’m so delicately referring to is the “work.”
Those that watch others’ success (not that you don’t have it already) only see the peak of that success. Within that bright sparkly effervescence of joy, many of us (yes, me too) wish to either coattail on the wave of their success in a fancy daydream or fester within an angry tirade of personal doubt and angst because we haven’t won such accolades.
Sitting in my local coffee shop at 5:30 a.m. every day for the past few years, I’ve finally come to realize my own dreams. However, these dreams don’t begin atop a wonderful mountain of success. They begin and continue as a drudgingly mushy quagmire of minute-by-minute shoving and pushing of myself to write/edit/write and edit. Every damn day.
Another fellow early bird of coffee cuisine and air conditioned solitude mirrors that push of desire – every day. We quickly toss a few words to each other but our glares quickly succumb to our needs and we get to what we’re gettin’ too. He’s becoming successful in his own way. But what you see of what he’s accomplished is only the other side of what I’ll see the next morning,
At this stage of my own writing I’ve settled in with much divisive negativity towards other writers that have accomplished their dreams. I don’t read them and I couldn’t care where their careers take them – up or down. Because this is about me. Me and that other fellow – Bright and early.
Do yourself a favor the next time you fondly reminisce over someone else’s dreams that come true. Instead of wondering how much they make or how popular they are, consider what time they wake up each day. Consider what they’ve given up in order to maintain that daily purposeful grind.
By: Vernie Brown
