Corey Pemberton

Writes dark, character-driven fiction. Blogs about creativity.

On Bucking Trends and Being Great: Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

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I have a confession to make:

I’ve been putting my life on hold. I’m guilty of doing this from time to time. But last year was my worst (and longest-lasting) experience.

What do I mean?

I’ve adopted the terrible habit of tying my sense of well-being to external metrics. Worst of all? Because they’re external, they’re beyond my control.

It took reading devouring Ryan Holiday’s excellent book Perennial Seller for the epiphany to deliver its cold slap just in time for the new year.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean…

I entered 2017 with a big, bad, audacious goal of making $X a year selling my fiction. I had a different number in mind for my freelance work. I wanted to be 165 pounds with 12 percent body fat.

(And on and on. You get the idea.)

While I wasn’t exactly the paragon of productivity last year, what I lacked in efficiency I made up for in hard work.

Which made it even more maddening when I closed out the year without hitting some of those marks.

If it sounds like a less than blissful way to live, that’s because it is. When your entire life is defined by striving for external metrics:

  • Happiness is delayed
  • Every morning you wake up without being there makes you feel like a failure
  • You deprive yourself from savoring small victories

I tend to put a ton of pressure on myself. (Are you the same way?)

Bottom line: I got so wrapped up in the metrics last year that I started mistaking them for success.

Failing to hit everything I wanted forced me to step back and reevaluate.

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Learning to Love the Gap

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Let’s talk about potential.

There it is. See it shimmering high up atop a mountain or floating among the clouds. Everything you could be… if you only did the work and refused to let life derail you.

Now look down.

Back to reality. Back to where you are at this very moment.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

A giant chasm separates who we are to who we’d love to become.

At least it feels like a giant chasm to me. More often than not, when I look and compare the two, the void between them seems damn near insurmountable. On especially good days, the fissure is smaller…

But it’s still there.

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Comfort Is a Lie (Rules to Live by)

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Sometimes I find myself caught in the most beautiful trap in the world.

That’s one of the most insidious things about it. It doesn’t look like a trap. Chasing comfort is like wandering into a hot tub after a night stranded in a frozen forest.

In other words, it’s freaking tempting.

Who in their right mind would refuse?

Here’s what happens. You let out a big sigh as your muscles go slack. Surrounded by shiny objects, you sink into all the soft spots and lose the will to get up.

By the time you realize it’s a trap (you’ve probably discovered this in the past, but this lesson has a way of being forgotten), it’s damn near impossible to move.

Comfort is sleeping in when you should wake up. It’s the flicker of the TV screen, blue and relentless. It’s every time you accept less from yourself when you know you should have given more.

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Choosing Now

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“Where is my mind? Way out in the water, See it swimmin’…”

I don’t have any tattoos. But if I ever got inked, I could do much worse than those lyrics from one of my favorite bands of all time.

I’ve had the privilege to see the Pixies twice, once at ACL and then again at Austin Music Hall. I still get chills thinking about those shows. Something about the confusion and alienation and anger overlaid over those sick bass lines really does it for me.

The purpose of my Pixies tattoo would be twofold. It would remind me of those incredible shows. More importantly, I’d serve as a much-needed slap on the head, a cry to wake up.

I live in my head a lot.

That’s what most writers do.

And this isn’t limited to people whose work demands they type alone in front of a computer screen. Stroll down the street and you’ll see people walking dogs and riding bikes and driving along, most of them staring straight ahead, most of them not even there at all.

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