There are no doubt people who write whole books about how to get famous presenting clear cut methods full of sensible common sense advice, and there are no doubt a lot of people who buy books like that, or trawl the internet for videos or blogs with advice like that. If you are reading this you might be one of those people. And because I am most likely to disappoint you with this article, I better come clean quickly and spill the beans what this article is about so that those of you desperately searching for genuine advice can move on. Because this article is actually about the impossibility of such advice. I am gonna argue that most of the advice given on the topic is probably well meant but misguided in at least one of two ways. Either it is genuine but still misleading because it doesn’t mention luck, or it is totally wrong because it argues backwards starting from analysing someone who happens to be famous and successful and is likely to yield complete nonsense, because they are looking for a how did they do it secret which is a mirage.
To elaborate this a bit lets have a look at the helpful advice. Something like: get organised, don’t waste your time, try to get a clear idea of what you want to achieve and once you are sure stick with it even when the going get tough, work hard, etc. etc All of this is of course true, but it is misleading because it never mentions that just doing these right things is not enough. And by not enough I mean not even near to enough. It is merely helpful behaviour. But it simply completely ignores that fame and success depend on many many other things as well, some of them can be controlled, some are down to pure luck. In sports you can do everything right and become a world class super athlete, but then have an unlucky injury, or even simpler you might have been just unlucky that your body at that time on that day where the big race is was just not good enough just to beat that other guy who also did everything right.
Instinctively everybody knows that luck plays a huge role in everybody’s life, but there are several factors which make us uneasy about that fact. For starters it seems like a cop out. A story that losers tell themselves to cope with the fact that they screwed up. Blaming bad luck is like the ultimate admittance of defeat. Loser but not willing to take the blame, not willing to give the other guy the credit he is due, instead blaming luck. That’s why no one likes the guy who came second. In sport we at least know who came second. In most other walks of life the guy who came second and didn’t get the record deal, whose film wasn’t produced, whose book wasn’t published, they will never even be mentioned, no one hears about them. And no one wants to hear about them, because they have those loser stories where they worked so hard and thought they did everything right and then shit happened and it didn’t work out. These stories will always sound like bad excuses, and what could we possibly learn from them.
This brings us to the other group of advice, the bonkers group. This advice comes with looking at the winners and trying to figure out what made them so good. They we think have the stories that will inspire and help us, because obviously since they actually did succeed and became famous they need to know something. And of course they do. They probably know a lot of stuff about their work, and they probably know that they had to spend a lot of time to work hard and get organised and hang in there when the going got tough, etc. But then they also got lucky every now and then, and they might mention that but they usually don’t really blame their success on luck, that would be silly wouldn’t it. Instead they will try to find what gave them the special edge. Was it that they were always eating bananas for breakfast, or that they tried to survive on 3 hour sleep every day, or that they slept at least 14 hours every day, or that they slept always just as long as they felt like sleeping. That they had at least half a bottle of whiskey, or maybe that they were never drinking.
At the end of the day they might find some reasons which are pure and simple nothing but superstition. Deep down they know they got lucky and they hope that they find a reason what made them lucky because if they couldn’t then oh horror their luck might change any moment now. And look, it often does.
The sad truth is that most successful people probably aren’t really experts on how to get successful, they don’t need to be. They need to be good at what they do and happen to be at the right time and the right place, i.e. get lucky and then maybe also have the nerve not to screw up when it all comes together, which is something that is much easier if one has a lucky charm or some crazy belief to hang on to. Sadly this hasn’t prevented basically all people in the self help industry or success science like I am sure they love calling themselves, to try and understand the secrets for success based on analysing the behaviour and conviction of successful people. Starting with Napoleon Hill who could be credited to have invented to the modern manual for a successful career with his books “The Law of Success” and “Think and Grow Rich”, which although allegedly based on empirical research of looking at the lives of rich and successful people never succeeded in founding a science of success but was pretty influential in keeping up the American myth of the rags to riches success story, and the self made man.
The important thing to notice is, and this might as well be the real secret of success that no one ever tells, which might have to do with the fact that it isn’t really a secret of success but technically speaking a meta-secret about all so called secrets of success, there is no secret to success. The truth is usually pretty obvious and blatantly not hidden at all. It appears to be a secret though, because it is never easy and never simple. It seems to be hidden because it is complex and at least partially uncontrollable.
The problem in life is that in most things which are interesting there is no simple reason or recipe. Many things need to come together at the right time and place. Nobody will have real success unless he or she does a lot of things right and well. So all the sensible advice is a good thing to start with. It is just very important not to fall into the trap of thinking that doing the right thing is a recipe for fame and success. There is no recipe for that, because it can’t be controlled.
In philosophy this is the old distinction between necessary condition and sufficient condition. Doing the right things is a necessary condition, because while success and fame can’t be forced they can be prevented by screwing up, but sadly it is not a sufficient condition. A lot of other things need to fit as well, before it will actually happen.
A part of that is down to plain and simple luck and there is no way to guess predict or control it and all superstitious or pseudo scientific explanations are bound to confuse the matter rather that to help. But people like to get confused because with the confusion comes the illusion that maybe there is something that will allow us to really control our destiny, which we just haven’t quite understood yet, and this is a hope which most of us tend to prefer to the insight that there are many things which are just random forces and completely uncontrollable.
So does that mean, it all doesn’t matter and we can give up and there is nothing to hope for? Nonsense, doing the right thing is a necessary condition for having success and moreover success doesn’t have to mean the big international stardom kind of success anyway. Maybe that has too many bad side effect as well and should be left to the people who find themselves forced into it (I am sure I could easily write another long blog about the question whether big fame is something one should want in the first place. Little fame is I think inevitable a good thing, but where is the boundary?).
Anyhow, doing the right things is a value in itself, and one should do them because it makes life nicer and more interesting. And most of all one should do what one likes to do anyway. Imagine having success with something you hate doing, and then being forced to do it over and over again and with huge audiences looking at you doing it, surely that would be true torture.
Existentialism & Humourism 
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