On chasing 'success'

A few months ago I was posting a new job at my company on social media, the fourth new position created in my department in less than a year. I was feeling very good about the growth my team has enjoyed after years of frustrating stagnation, and admit the post was as much about flexing a bit as surveying for candidates.

(We've since added a fifth new job and, not too far off, a sixth.)

Amidst the usual reach-outs from friends and colleagues asking about the job, someone I'd worked with in journalism and I were messaging back and forth when they said something that took me aback. They'd recently lost their own job, and while this one wasn't a good fit for them, they wanted me to know I was an "inspiration" for how I'd landed.

For anyone who came up in traditional media over the past couple of decades, job separations and dramatic career/life changes are pro forma events. Virtually everyone I worked with in the Indy Star and the Ocala Star-Banner newsrooms is now doing something else, and many have switched several times. Not a few have struggled -- professionally, emotionally and financially -- so I understood where this former colleague was coming from.

Still, the word 'inspiration' threw me for a loop. As someone who's struggled with self-esteem issues his whole life, the idea that someone was inspired by my journey just seemed ludicrous. When confronted with praise, my usual first instinct is to think the person is joking around or even poking fun at me.

The truth is I have often felt more like a failure. 

Indeed, just a few short years ago if you'd asked me to assess my career with the clear-eyed sobriety of a journalist, I would have said it was a disaster, or something very much close to it. Back then I'd just lost my job -- the second time that same calendar year -- after getting laid off from the Indy Star almost a decade earlier. Becoming the entertainment editor of a metropolitan newspaper was an incredibly satisfying step for me, and that loss was counted not just in the paycheck I no longer received but the subtraction of a substantial portion of my identity.

I was musing to my wife the other day that the last time I wrote a resignation letter was 2005. Since then, three separations not by my choice. I can't begin to tell you how much better it is for your psyche and your job-hunting prospects to walk out the door rather than be shown out.

Additionally, the movie criticism I'd always kept up as a side hustle/passion project was facing its own stumbles and uncertainty, with a cadre of longtime collaborators to our website departing to do their own thing, followed by what I can only describe as the slow-motion ghosting of my founding partner. I knew he'd experienced lots of turmoil in his own personal and professional life, and thought I was providing space and support. 

Eventually, he made clear he wanted a permanent break. I quickly had to react and take on the administrative/business side duties, including dealing with a woefully outdated website as we'd lost our webmaster, too. Repeated outreach attempts on my part to continue the relationship, personally if not professionally, were met with silence.

But, like all worms, this one turned.

After a long and often-depressing job search, I stumbled onto the job with Aspire Indiana Health, a healthcare nonprofit. They were in a very weird situation, poised to grow by leaps and bounds, but having no marketing function to speak of. I essentially had to make a strategic plan from scratch, try new things, experience many challenges and endure some failures. But I learned to pivot and explore, and realized I was growing more in my second, more-foisted-upon-than-chosen profession during the first year in this new role than I had in the previous eight or nine years.

COVID threw everything into a loop, and I encountered resistance to growing my department long after it needed to happen organically. But the dam finally broke, helped greatly by a pair of new forward-thinking officers, and by the end of 2024 my team will have quadrupled from where it started. We've won national awards and can boast an ROI of thousands of new patients coming in the door.

On the journalism side, I plunged into the world of Substacking, spending much time porting over more than a decade of content to the new version of Film Yap. I truly think its hybrid approach of website and newsletter, with easily integrated podcasts and multimedia, represents the future of journalism, or at least the non-corporate version where individual journalists or small teams can actually make a living through subscriptions. 

Our numbers are still fairly small by the measure of the major newsletter outfits like The Free Press, but if the trickle of incoming money is not large, it's much bigger than it was even at the height of our old WordPress website days. I'm able to pay my Film Yap contributors, not a lot but something, which makes me very proud.

(I was even able to get rid of the "The" in the site's name, something that always rankled me.)

Additionally, the broadcast portion of my film criticism took a major bump up when I was recruited to join a new show on FOX59, jumping almost overnight from the lowest-rated local network to the highest-rated morning lineup. Though functionally no different from my end -- I drive into a news station on Fridays and yap about movies for five minutes or so -- it has cachet within the TV world, and has opened up a few doors.

Getting back to the "inspiration" message: weirdly enough, at the time that conversation was taking place I had recently learned I would be elevated to the executive roster of my company, though I wasn't able to announce it publicly until just this week. So even though I was about to reach a previously unimagined level in my professional career, still there was that abrupt disconnect with how I actually felt -- like biting on tinfoil.

I guess it comes down to this idea of success, a word with almost unimaginable power within our society. 

It's what everyone wants to be, to marry, to associate themselves with. Not long ago I read an article a friend shared, an interview with them talking about their path to success. Though I have no problem with another person using it to describe themselves, doing so myself would be akin to trying to swallow an anvil -- simply inconceivable.

To me it seems so many of us are forever chasing this chimera of success, without ever critically analyzing what form that actually takes. 

Mostly it seems to be not any concrete criteria of accomplishment, but the symbols of status that we attain: job titles, money, a fancy house, a window office, nice clothes, cars and vacations, etc. That status window dressing has never really mattered to me -- probably because I never had it -- but I've come to recognize that other people react to those symbols and treat you accordingly.

Just in the brief time my joining the executive team has become known within the company, I've noticed how differently people treat you. It's less, "Will you do this for me?", and more, "Do you have any ideas how to help with this issue?" It's a very nice feeling to be seen as someone people look toward for advice and leadership.

So am I a successful person? Gosh, I sure don't feel like one.

I tend to be a pretty goal-directed person, so much of my thinking is taken up by trying to achieve certain things. Sometimes I do, but I often I don't, or it takes a lot longer and is a lot harder than I think it should. I get bogged down in the things that aren't happening the way I'd like and neglect to celebrate the things that are.

Again, trying to set aside my cringey feelings and put on that objective observer hat, I guess one would have to say the answer to the question is... yes? 

(Even typing it here, a small but loud voice inside me hollers, "Shut the hell up!")

I'm an executive of a large company that has grown dramatically, due in no small part to my team's efforts. After being stuck in essentially the same place for 15 years, my remuneration has risen to a level my former self would regard as eye-opening. I enjoy the hell out of the film journalism I do, in collaboration with a diverse group of people I appreciate and am able to reward. I live in a nice house in a fantastic city, with a family I cherish. I even have the wherewithal to play around with old cars when I find the time.

So forgive me if all this sounds very trite and self-pitying. But the events of the last few years -- really, the last couple of decades -- have led me to a place where I try to acknowledge and accept the wayward journey I've been on, including the really dark and depressing parts. 

Where you are now cannot be separated from where you have been. It's been a long and bumpy road, but I look around at the destination and find the odd, unfamiliar sensation of satisfaction. And while I still instinctively recoil at words like "inspiration" and "success," I'm very grateful for where I now find myself.