“The author Stephen King unwittingly conducted a similar experiment when,
worried that the public would not accept his books as quickly as he could churn
them out, he wrote a series of novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Sales figures indicated that even Stephen King, without the name, is no Stephen
King. (Sales picked up considerably after word of the author’s true identity finally
got out.) Sadly, one experiment King did not perform was the opposite: to swathe
wonderful unpublished manuscripts by struggling writers in covers naming him as
the author. But if even Stephen King, without the name, is no Stephen King, then
the rest of us, when our creative work receives a less-than-Kingly reception,
might take comfort in knowing that the differences in quality might not be as
great as some people would have us believe.
“Years ago at Caltech, I had an office around the corner from the office of a
physicist named John Schwarz. He was getting little recognition and had suffered a
decade of ridicule as he almost single-handedly kept alive a discredited theory,
called string theory, which predicted that space has many more dimensions than
the three we observe. Then one day he and a co-worker made a technical
breakthrough, and for reasons that need not concern us here, suddenly the extra
dimensions sounded more acceptable. String theory has been the hottest thing in
physics ever since. Today John is considered one of the brilliant elder statesmen of
physics, yet had he let the years of obscurity get to him, he would have been a
testament to Thomas Edison’s observation that “many of life’s failures are people
who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”24”
“Another physicist I knew had a story that was strikingly similar to John’s. He was,
coincidentally, John’s PhD adviser at the University of California, Berkeley.
Considered one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, this physicist
was a leader in an area of research called S-matrix theory. Like John, he was
stubbornly persistent and continued to work on his theory for years after others
had given up. But unlike John, he did not succeed. And because of his lack of
success he ended his career with many people thinking him a crackpot. But in my
opinion both he and John were brilliant physicists with the courage to work—
with no promise of an imminent breakthrough—on a theory that had gone out of
style. And just as authors should be judged by their writing and not their books’
sales, so physicists—and all who strive to achieve—should be judged more by
their abilities than by their success.
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see
fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive
vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe
that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well
designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to
make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least.
But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to
ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the
equation—the role of chance.”
“It is no tragedy to think of the most successful people in any field as
superheroes. But it is a tragedy when a belief in the judgment of experts or the
marketplace rather than a belief in ourselves causes us to give up, as John
Kennedy Toole did when he committed suicide after publishers repeatedly
rejected his manuscript for the posthumously best-selling Confederacy of
Dunces. And so when tempted to judge someone by his or her degree of success,
I like to remind myself that were they to start over, Stephen King might be only a
Richard Bachman and V. S. Naipaul just another struggling author, and somewhere
out there roam the equals of Bill Gates and Bruce Willis and Roger Maris who
are not rich and famous, equals on whom Fortune did not bestow the right
breakthrough product or TV show or year. What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep
marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role,
one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the
number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. “For even a coin
weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer
Thomas Watson said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
Excerpt From: Mlodinow, Leonard. “The Drunkard's Walk.” Knopf, 2008-05-13.
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