A Little Bit of Success

Let’s talk about success.

There are a whole lot of ideas out there about what “success” actually means, and for many people that can be boiled down to how much money did you make on X or doing X or what have you. The point is, many thoughts out there around the idea of “success” are monetary.

I think this is total bullshit.

There are lots of ways to have success!

Success simply means that you have achieved whatever goal you set out for that thing.

Think back to when you were a kid and you sat down in math class and worked on a hard problem for a while and couldn’t figure out how to make it all fit together to get any answer that made sense and then suddenly it clicked and you solved the problem. Your teacher might say, “Hey, great work, you successfully completed that problem.” Well, that’s how life works.

If your goal in life is to become a wife and mother and you achieve that? Success! If your goal in life is to solo travel the world and you find a job that’s remote and lets you run around the continents? Success! If your goal is to sit at home and make 7 figures playing video games all day and you figure out a way to make that work for yourself? Success.

I often struggle to place myself in the field of having any success at all. I have made steps towards a larger goal, but I still find myself getting really down because I don’t feel successful.

And when that happens, I have to remind myself: are you looking for success from money or from just simply doing the thing?

To be honest, the answer is: BOTH!

I’m like that High School Musical 3 song. I want it all.

Something I hear often is “do the work and the money will come.” Do the work and the money will come. Ok, Mr. Optimism, sounds too good to be true, especially when there are literally thousands of people out there not doing the work and still seeing the money.

But I hear you. And I do want to believe that’s true. But sometimes, it can be hard to want to continue doing the work when the money just isn’t coming.

Since I was 3 years old, I have wanted to be a writer. I spent my childhood writing books and stories, I studied writing in school and at workshops and classes. I believe in the power of cross-training and I began taking acting classes to learn how to better get into the minds of the characters I was creating in my writing work.

I journal, I run a blog, I have a newsletter, I write poetry, I write short stories, I am writing my third novel, I write short plays and full-length plays and I’m even writing a musical.

I have spent hours searching for publishing, production, and development opportunities for my work.

I’ve done the thing. Where’s my damn money?

Ok, Layli. Slow down. Deep breath. Relax. Is making money your only goal?

It’s ok if it is. My high school film teacher told our class a story of an old friend of his whose only goal was to have a job where he didn’t have to do a lot of work and could make a lot of money. So the school counselor suggested he study computers and technology. He took her advice, he graduated with a degree in something equivalent to computer science, and got a job working for a company that paid him a lot right out of college. With his job, he found a niche in his company that he could specialize in and began working with that particular thing until he developed a program that could do his entire job for him. He would take home a paycheck and didn’t have to do anything during the day, except make sure no one ever found out he wasn’t the one doing the actual work. Within three years, he was making 6 figures and doing nothing. He’d achieved his goal. He was successful.

And that’s amazing. It truly is.

But I think about that story a lot when I begin to feel the question of where’s my damn money creep up in relation to my own work which is why I posit back, is making money your only goal?

“Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around…”

Sometimes, it is. There have been moments in my life where the honest answer is yes, and I go out and I find 3-4 part-time jobs and all I do is work somewhere I don’t want to be, doing something I don’t want to do, to bring home a paycheck.

For the most part, however, the answer to that question is a big, fat, resounding HELL NO.

I would be doing this work and writing and creating if it didn’t pay anything for my whole life, as evidenced by the fact that it’s paid nothing my whole life and here I am, still doing it.

So I try to celebrate the non-monetary successes.

For example: in 2024, I had a short play produced at two different colleges. I wrote three different radio plays that were produced off-Broadway with a lovely group I’ve been working with for about a year. I had a successful workshop of a full-length play of mine that culminated in a reading with professional actors. I had another short play of mine accepted to a playwrights conference where it was performed and adjudicated and I got to meet so many other really cool artists and creatives. I had a short play published in an online literary magazine and another monologue published in print in an anthology.

Wow!

All that in just one year.

And I lied. I did make (a very little amount of) money from my writing in 2024. I made a whopping grand total of $176.26. Between the workshop, publications, and productions, I was able to find places that actually paid me for the writing I did.

Is it as much as I’d like to be paid? No. I would love a 6 figure book deal and for 10 of my plays to be produced and to be a paid food critic (that last one is a bit of a stretch given I’ve never had the desire to write a food review, I just like the idea of being paid to eat and then write about what it is I’m eating). But that’s not my reality right now.

Right now, my reality is that I set out to be a writer and to just do the thing. And you know what? I did the thing. And the money followed.

Damn all those optimistic people.

My goal with writing is not always to make money with it. Sometimes it is, and my ultimate goal is to be able to quit my day job and become a writer full-time, but sometimes it’s also nice to just see a project through and put it into the world and let other people hear it and react to it and connect with it.

I’m an artist. I create work because I want to connect with other people. And when I can do that, regardless of whether or not it pays me, I know I have been successful.