What are your goals?
How will you succeed? What do you plan to do once you’ve achieved
it?
I heard these questions so much in high school and
by the time I had turned Nineteen I was flat out sick of it. 19.
The number, that age seems so foreign now. All through my teens, and afterwards every
college mock interview, the same thing: “So where do you see yourself 5 years
from now?” in one some variation or another. When they finally stopped asking
that told me two things: 1) I was
finally “grown” and 2) No one cared. I’m
sitting here now, practically punching my keyboard because I’ve finally made a
choice. What that choice is…I don’t know.
Not completely anyway. But it has been made. Ironically, it started with the aforementioned
dumb-ass question:
What would
happen if you succeed?
Age 35 I realized I couldn’t answer that
question. I didn’t want to. I don’t mind feeding bull-shit to the
stuff-shirts, but I’m not about to kid myself.
Life is WAAAAY too random, and your mindset can change without you even
knowing it sometimes. Whenever I try to
capitalize on an opportunity (and believe me I’ve had plenty), something comes
along and kicks the chair out from under me;
Finances, family, some hang-up that I can’t deal with, or I just flat
out got passed up. Self-sabotage isn’t
out of the question, a while back I wrote about being afraid of success. I just expect to come up short now, ever
since I moved to North Carolina it’s been one ‘L’ after another; after 13
years, the upshots of living here can be counted on one hand.
Success is a foreign tongue to me. I don’t hunger for money the way much of the
world tells us we should (financial stability yes, but money for money’s sake,
never.) That kind greed is a trait I
despise and tends to breed cruelty along with the reptilian instinct to fuck
over just about any and everyone in an unending, unwinnable contest for
resources, money and any kind of fame.
People don’t have names anymore; they have brands and corporate
identities. That’s not the success I see for myself. Never have.
I’m not a ‘boss’ or ‘shot-caller’, I’m just a dude who wants to do what
he’s always done. I want to tell
stories; JK Rowling, Jack Kirby, Stephen King, Jim Lee…any person reading this
recognizes at least two of these names.
My goal is to be numbered among them.
A similar question proved to be fairly profound,
probably because it was the first time I had asked it to myself and really
REALLY thought on it:”How would you feel if you reached that success?”
How would I feel? Proud maybe? Dumbfounded?
Totally numb to it? How did
Superman feel when he learned he could fly?
How did T’Challa feel when he became King? Anxious maybe… As I said before, it’s not a taste that I’m
used to. I once wrote of the possibility
that I may be afraid of success. The
kind of success everyone wants an educated black man to have, where you carry
everyone until you break and when you finally do, there’s no one to pick you
up. No.
I’ve decided that my success would be the weird and nerdy self-indulgent
success I knew as an athlete. That taste
of personal accomplishment, knowing that I can do it because I’ve done it. That’s the success I want. That’s the feeling I love, when someone asks
me “Hey can you handle this project” and I can say, “Yeah, no problem…" with
no problem.
I think I’m gonna stop here for now but I’ll
definitely be writing more about it.
