Success and failure are more transient states than we are sometimes willing to acknowledge.
A comedian could be giving the best set of their life — a success by all accounts — only to end with a joke that hits all the wrong notes, leaving the audience wondering if the comedian really is as good as they had thought literal moments ago.
Yesterday a video of a DJ set showed up on my YouTube feed featuring an artist that I hadn’t heard in along time: Rebecca Black. I, and clearly much of the crowd in the video, loved it. Black is also the same artist who just over a decade ago released the song “Friday” which was decidedly ill-famed at the time…but in a rather wonderful and poetic twist Black ended her DJ set with this very same song which was met with dramatically positive reception.
If the last thing you did did not land the way you wanted, there’s always the next act. If the that act doesn’t work out, there’s the act after that.
Yes, life is finite. No, we don’t have unlimited acts. But we get far more than we probably realize. And the stakes of the last thing we did, however good or bad, simply do not amount to the perpetually life-defining triumph or failure we sometimes estimate them to be which is useful to understand.
You can evolve, you can change arenas, you can play a different game, you can reinvent yourself, and you can make something great.
