The Pain of Success

A restaurateur is doing great work at steep odds into a headwind with inadequate support in a poor economy with loads and loads of potential customers who simply don't get it. As her adrenal glands prove sickeningly inadequate long-term engines, she's beginning to panic. So I sent her this:


I understand that you feel like you're holding up the whole world. You're running a one-person operation, juggling more pieces than anyone could competently handle, so pieces keep dropping. You are tortured by the growing sense that you can't possibly keep this up for much longer. Let me share what I learned when I was forced to juggle more pieces than I could handle with my internal organs screeching deep survival signals that this is not viable.

I never grew comfortable with the balls I was forced to drop, which was why I never stopped trying not to drop them even though there was no choice. I never stopped aiming for perfection even while acknowledging its impossibility. And it never stopped feeling like torture. The survival signal blasted day and night.

Having spoken to a bunch of other people who've done one-man impossible things, I understand that this is How It Is. We all vary in our tolerance level to howling survival signals, but no one ever for a moment imagines it as long-term viable. Yet some persist. The ones who don't quit. The locos who keep going.

Failure becomes something to reduce and manage, not to eliminate, even while paradoxically shooting for perfection. To a perfectionist (and only perfectionists get this far) it's exquisite torture, and it's hard to do your best work under such conditions. Many would imagine it impossible, but that's why most people don't run great restaurants or do groundbreaking work. They dismiss even the possibility. And that's not unreasonable!

Greatness is rare. Groundbreaking is rare. When you spot it, there's always some tortured schmuck somewhere, fraught over inevitable failure. The quality of what they turn out stems not from superhuman competency. They've just learned to stabilize in chaos, and stick with circumstances that would make most people run screaming for the hills. They don't flinch.

They don't flinch.

This all might seem grandiose, so let me hastily point out that I'm also describing parenthood. At least, the good parents. And there actually are good ones! I've even met a few!

A parent can't control every detail, and must persist, in perpetuity, with very high standards inside an agonizing failure engine. The predicament is not so unfamiliar after all!

Of course, most people are horrible parents, "sticking with it" only in the most dialed-in sense, and with perfectionism long-abandoned if ever present. Nominally committed, they either draw very hard lines to forcibly try to stave off failure (think supermax prison management) or else shrug into lassez faire, figuring the children will find their way. The golden ability to hate failure...while accepting failure...while guarding against future failure...while knowing failure will happen anyway...and not flinching, is not common.

Great parents willingly stick with the impossible, declining the escape routes of supermax wardenhood or resigned wraithhood. Impossibly high standards somehow persist along with a grounded acceptance that they're a distant and unattainable mirage. It's torture, but they focus not on the local climate, but on the doing. Unflinchingly.

If all this seems too horrific to consider, then don't have kids, don't open restaurants, and don't try to be a groundbreaker. At the other extreme, if you imagine you have what it takes to simply plow right through and make it all work, I hope I've splashed cold water over your cartoonishly false view. You're not so indomitable. No one is. There will be failure and there will be torture, but also perhaps a great result—for others, at least, as you hang your head in shame for the failure filling your visual field.

You can't accomplish while escaping adversity, and you can't endure adversity without unceasing survival warnings. Panic, even. The trick is to stop flinching. That's all. Keep doing what you're doing, but stop flinching.

So all this, really, was to reassure you that you're in good company and that all is well. Carry on!