CONCLUSION

What’s Luck Got to Do with It?

There are many things within creators’ control: What they decide to work on and the attitude they bring to their work. Their ability to refine their creation and position that work properly. The energy and resources they throw at marketing. The platform they build and the audience they cultivate before and after they’ve made something.

These are critical factors. No author, no entrepreneur, no maker of any kind is likely to succeed without them. But there is one other important ingredient to success that is not in our control, and it’s one we haven’t talked about yet in this book: luck.

It would be dishonest to talk about creating a classic, perennial seller and pretend that luck has nothing to do with it. Because luck matters a lot. John Fante, the author whose story I’ve told throughout these pages, saw his career nearly ruined by bad luck and then remade decades later in a stroke of amazingly good luck.

Luck is polarizing. The successful like to pretend it does not exist. The unsuccessful or the jaded pretend that it is everything. Both explanations are wrong. No matter what we have heard from our parents and internalized as part of the American Dream, hard work does not trump all. At the very, very top, the world is not a simple meritocracy, and it never has been. As Nassim Taleb puts it, “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.”

Just ask Bruce Springsteen. Born to Run—and by extension, Springsteen’s career—has a story defined by pure and unadulterated luck. Two totally unplanned but incredibly fortuitous events occurred that helped make the album—now celebrating its fortieth anniversary and some six million copies sold—the monster success that it eventually became.

The first lucky break happened when, mistakenly assuming that the album was nearly done, Springsteen and the label released “Born to Run” as the lead radio single. But the record was delayed and the single got some six months of unexpected radio play before the album came out. This soft launch was totally accidental—in fact, contrary to their plans—but the fluke created much-needed buzz and runway for the album itself.

Second, Springsteen had struggled with a relatively unsupportive label up until that point. In a moment of frustration, he complained about their contentious relationship in an interview with a college newspaper reporter. It just so happened that the label’s new president had a son who attended that very college. The kid read the article and passed it to his father, who reached out to bury the hatchet with Bruce. Their improved relationship meant he was finally able to launch a major record with the true force of a supportive label behind him.

In other words, Bruce had made a masterpiece. He had spent the extra time polishing and positioning it (in fact, that was why its release was delayed). He had begun to build a platform for himself. Yet if the single hadn’t been released prematurely and if some kid hadn’t read an article in his school paper, things might have turned out very differently.

There’s another thing about this Bruce Springsteen anecdote that bears mentioning. Born to Run was his third album. He’d signed his major label deal several years prior, but he was still struggling to find success. Yet he stayed at it. In that sense, getting lucky wasn’t an accident. It’s that old saying: The more you do, the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.

Still, that’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it? That an artist can do everything right and it still might not work out? Or that it might still involve years of demoralizing struggle against massive odds? And the X factor in all of it is . . . luck?!?

What Happens If We Don’t Get Lucky?

As I was finishing an early draft of this book, someone recommended that I watch a documentary about MxPx, a punk band I’d listened to a lot as a kid. The documentary opens with the band celebrating its twenty-second year as a group. They’d released sixteen albums, twenty singles, and three films, sold more than 2.5 million records, and toured hundreds of thousands of miles on every continent but Antarctica. I remember watching the Super Bowl on TV in high school and seeing them in a commercial. That’s as big as it gets, right?

I’d always held MxPx up as a model for one kind of artist’s career. Their success meant that it was possible to make it without selling out or courting fame. In many ways, I based my own career around this idea. I wanted to be successful without being massive.

And yet—and this nearly made me choke up—the documentary begins with the band as they are more or less deciding to break up. The band was having financial problems. They were tired. Two of the three members had decided to stop touring and take full-time jobs in the shipyards near where they grew up, just as their fathers had done a generation before. It was like the reverse of a Springsteen song. Instead of the dream taking them out of their small industrial town, it showed them all that was possible in the world and then cruelly dropped them back off there in their mid-thirties?

It can’t end like this, I thought as I watched it. The very thing that had inspired me to pursue my own career was starting to feel like a lie. Do nice guys really come in last? Small-town kids chase their dream, hit it big, and never sell out, but at the end of the day have to get regular nine-to-five jobs like the rest of us? I was depressed for weeks after. I felt guilty, as if I’d messed up as a fan. Did I not support them enough? Was it because people just pirate music these days? Did the label screw them? I wanted someone to blame. I wanted some explanation that this was an anomaly and that it wasn’t fair.

As a creator myself, I was worried too, about my career and my own ability to support myself as a writer. Was it possible to accomplish so much and still have to struggle? Was this how it was going to be for me too?

As I struggled with these questions, it occurred to me that I could take advantage of one of the privileges of being a writer and just ask the band directly. I reached out to them, under the vague pretense of interviewing them for this marketing book, but the reality was I just needed to know: Was I wrong about perennial sellers? Had I been naive? Was there something I was missing about the arc of their career? Did they screw up somehow? Could I someday find myself in the same spot in my own career?

I finally reached Mike Herrera, the band’s founder, lead singer, and songwriter, after he’d returned from a tour in Europe. Talking to this generous, friendly, and patient man, I realized I was being ridiculous and silly.* Not only because, as it turns out, the band kept going and began recording together again shortly after the documentary came out. (They’re just spending less time on the road—a privilege they have certainly earned—and the jobs two of them had gotten doing work on nuclear submarines paid very well.) But secondly, and surprisingly, the band members—despite every right to be—had no bitterness about their journey through the music business.

“It’s hard for people to understand that a band that toured constantly and seemingly was on top of the world had to get real jobs. It’s like—wow, that’s reality,” he told me. “But at the same time, reality isn’t that bad. Reality is actually pretty great. Everybody is doing something that they love and still able to come back to do the MxPx shows.”

Sure, there were things they wished they’d done differently. Better marketing, better business planning (not something a punk band thought they’d have to focus much on), better legal advice, and all that. The fact that the band’s members weren’t millionaires many times over was hardly a failure. Yes, that they were changing the band’s strategy after twenty-two years was, in some ways, proof that there are no guarantees in life. But in another way it’s proof that, if you work hard, you will always have at least some success.

MxPx was a band that got to do what they loved for more than two decades—and from the looks of it, they will continue to pursue that love. They made more money than most bands could realistically dream of. They’ve done more than any artist can rightfully aspire to. Mike Herrera explained their reality to me: “If I were to realize that door A, B, or C all lead to a lot of heartache and pain, but you know, A was what I really want, well, why not just choose A?” He quoted Tom Petty to me: “Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out.” When it comes to making your art—whether it’s music or writing or building a great company—you either really want it or you don’t. There is no easy way in, or out.

When Kevin Kelly put forth his idea about having one thousand true fans, he wasn’t saying you’d live like a king. He wasn’t saying you wouldn’t have to work hard, or that the struggle would be over. He was saying that you’d be able to make a living. He predicted that technology had made it possible to work and survive as an artist. Nowhere did he say that it would be easy or that you’d be filthy rich.

We didn’t get into the creative business because it was easy, and we didn’t get into it because of the certainties. In fact, most of us love this work because of the uncertainties, because that keeps it interesting. There remain many better, easier, less anxiety-producing ways to make money in this world. We didn’t get into this business for that. We got into it because we didn’t have a choice. We do what we do because there is nothing more rewarding than the artistic and creative process—even if those rewards aren’t always financial, even if they don’t accrue as quickly as we might have originally hoped.

At Mike Herrera’s invitation, I saw MxPx play in San Antonio—almost fifteen years to the day after the first time I’d seen them play, as a teenager in a small venue near my hometown in Northern California. It was an incredible experience to see someone play the same songs with the same energy to a crowd significantly more diverse than I ever remembered. The show also happens to be part of an unbroken string of sold-out concerts the band has had since it started touring again. They just celebrated a quarter century as a group.

Mike and I became friends over time, and one afternoon, walking down the street in Seattle, we stopped in a vintage guitar store where Mike had bought a guitar many years earlier. The owner of the store recognized him. It’d been at least a decade since they’d seen each other, and he asked how things were going with the band. They talked about the group’s long career. The owner beamed, his store having played a small role in it. Then the owner’s son came out and began to gush: “You’re Mike Herrera! From MxPx! I have all your records!”

This was the reason the owner had been excited—he’d heard his son listening to the music of a musician who’d once been to his store and gotten to impress his son in the way that all fathers ache to do. Mike, out for an ordinary afternoon walk, had bumped into the multigenerational impact of his work. He’d met a living, breathing embodiment of his perennial success. And I was lucky enough to be standing there and watching as these three people all experienced a tiny yet deeply personal moment that I can only imagine added meaning to the struggle that went into that success.

That’s the truly fortunate part of being able to do creative work for a living. It’s the best goddamn job in the world.

As for being lucky? The football coach Bill Walsh once explained the coaching strategy behind his Super Bowl–winning San Francisco 49ers as not being rooted in a relentless, aggressive pursuit of victory, but as something a little more counterintuitive—something that embraces the role of chance. After designing the right standards and assembling the right members for the team, Walsh explained that his goal was to “establish a near-permanent ‘base camp’ near the summit, consistently close to the top, within striking distance.” The actual probability of winning in a given year depended on a lot of external factors—injuries, schedule, drive, weather—just as it does for any mountain climber, for any author, for any filmmaker or entrepreneur or creative. We do know with certainty, however, that without the right preparation, there is zero chance of successfully making a run to the summit.

Walsh made three such summits in eight years with the 49ers. Was it preparation? Was it brilliance? Was it luck? It was all of these things assembled together.

It’s that assemblage that we’ve attempted to formulize in this book.

In the first half, we focused on the standards for our products and projects. Making sure that we made something that put us within striking distance of the top—something close to the best in class for our field. We checked and rechecked and prepared ourselves.

The second half was about actually attempting that trip to the summit. It was about making our best effort on the ascent, knowing that there are no guarantees. Knowing that we’ll need the right weather conditions and timely breaks to make it. How long it takes, how far we might get remains to be seen. But we’re going to try—because that’s who we are. This is what we do.

As for the uncertainty—that can’t bother us. Because, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, successfully fulfilling our creative need is “greater than hunger or sex or thirst, a need to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world. A need for immortality, and by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one’s name on a cake of ice on a hot July day.”

Whether our imprint on the world lasts ten years as Cyril Connolly hoped for himself, or ten minutes or ten centuries, we cannot say. But we have to try to leave our mark nonetheless, and try not only once, but again and again.

When I asked Craig Newmark what it felt like to know that he had created something used by millions of people, something that’s still going strong after twenty years, his answer was the perfect note to end this book on:

“It feels nice for a moment, then surreal, then back to work.”