What, not how
We all want success to arrive beautifully and on our terms, but it rarely shows up that way. Let go of how success should happen. Get clear on what you want, and let the path surprise you.
Hi,
I’ve spent most of my career trying to brute-force the universe. I thought that if I did the work, and not just any work, but the right work, then I’d get what I wanted.
And what I wanted wasn’t outrageous. At least not to me.
I wanted to write the books of my heart.
I wanted to reach a loyal audience.
I wanted to build a thriving business.
I wanted to be respected, paid, and lauded.
I thought that was the depth of it, but my needs really went deeper…because I also wanted it my way.
I wanted it on my weird horror comedy comics, even though there wasn’t a big audience for them.
With massive comic book store distribution, even though only a couple hundred stores in the world back in 2011 stocked indie comics.
And I wanted it immediately.
Without having to do that thing over there that felt gross or stupid or beneath me.
If it wasn’t the exact result I pictured when I closed my eyes, then it wasn’t a success. When things didn’t unfold like that, I didn’t feel disappointed. I felt betrayed.
After all, I had followed the rules, played the game, sacrificed, built redundant systems, and shown up for years.
So where was my reward? Where was the neatly wrapped success story all the books and courses and mastermind groups promised me?
Well, it was right there staring me in the face. I just refused to see it.
All the way back in 2015, I got labeled “the Kickstarter guy”. People started to find me, even a decade ago, and ask for help with their campaigns. I bristled, and ran away. I didn’t want that kind of success. I wanted to be known for my work, not a platform. I wanted to be an author, not a speaker. I wanted—
Ugh, even writing it now makes me want to smack myself. Like, didn’t I start this saying I wanted to be successful? And weren’t people paying me to do work I was good at and enjoyed success? Why was I so obtuse when I was younger?!
It’s so frustrating, and it wasn’t until 2021, when my ex-business partner told me they were going to use my work as a guide to co-write a Kickstarter book with me, that I finally had no choice but to become “The Kickstarter guy”…
…and guess what? It’s great to be that guy.
I constantly get to talk, strategize, and hang out with some of the most successful people in the world, get paid for my knowledge, and receive emails from giddy people that turned their careers around thanks to what I taught them.
I never got that with my fiction, even though that’s where I made most of my money for over a decade.
That is success, isn’t it? So, what was my problem all those years? So, so many things, but it boiled down to the fact that I was way too worried about influencing how things happened, instead of focusing on what I got out of the deal.
What I wanted was to wake up, do things I liked with people I liked, and have frictionless ease bringing new projects into the world. It would have been nice if it was in comics, or novels, but what I really wanted was the space and freedom to do whatever caught my fancy.
And I, largely, got that, despite the fact that it didn’t happen how I thought it “should”.
When I stopped focusing on the “how” and focused instead on the “what”, a whole host of new possibilities opened up to me.
The should held me back. It stuffed me into a very narrow lane filled with other people when there were open lanes to success everywhere else.
What nobody tells you (or maybe they do but you don’t actually believe it until it happens to you) is that you usually don’t get to dictate the path. You don’t get to choose how you become successful. You only get to choose what you’re willing to fight for.
You get to name:
The kind of life you want.
The kind of work you want to do.
The kind of people you want to reach.
The kind of impact you want to have.
But you don’t get to script the moment it happens. You don’t get to choreograph who notices, or how they find you, or which version of your work becomes the one that sticks.
Even if you somehow get all the things you ever wanted, and the book of your heart becomes a household name, there will be all sorts of chaos associated with it that you don’t expect. You’ll be saddled with things you don’t want, have to do things you don’t like, and have expectations foisted on you that you couldn’t imagine.
I realized way too late that the actions associated with my fiction, like actually talking about my books, were things I hated. I liked people reading my work, and I loved writing it, but all the marketing actions I liked revolved around my non-fiction.
Shocking that was what took off, right?
If you hold the path too tightly, if you cling to the idea that it must happen in this one specific way or else it doesn’t count, you will miss everything good that’s trying to find you.
You’ll say no to the thing that wants to work because it doesn’t look like the thing you thought would work. You’ll sabotage yourself in the name of purity. You’ll burn your career down in defense of a version of the dream that maybe never really served you in the first place.
And I get it because I’ve done it. I’ve thrown tons of great opportunities in the trash because they didn’t arrive wearing the right costume.
Eventually, I had to learn to stop making deals with the universe. I had to stop saying “I’ll do this if you give me what I asked for exactly the way I want it.”
It’s about getting out of your own way.
Because the truth is, the universe is a terrible negotiator. It doesn’t barter. It doesn’t owe you clarity. It doesn’t care about your timeline, but it does reward momentum, iteration, and stubborn clarity of want.
Not how. Just what.
So, I stopped fighting for the how. In 2022, after my first Kickstarter book blew up, I turned into the skid. We built a very popular Kickstarter course and I started getting booked to speak about Kickstarter everywhere. I made connections with everyone. I suddenly went from decently networked to amazingly networked, and people were talking about me.
I stopped needing it to look a certain way, sound a certain way, or arrive through a specific door.
And the moment I did? Weird things started working. I could take that momentum and turn it into things I cared about more than just Kickstarter. I was able to thread it into direct sales, and capitalism, and taking control of your career, and even my weird fiction books.
Not just in a general sense, either. For years, I’ve been trying to build a successful membership. I developed an app, hosted a Circle community, tried a Patreon, and more. Each time, I was trying to force a community to grow somewhere it didn’t have any interest in growing.
It wasn’t until I found Substack that I started having success. I don’t think I had 100 paid members across all my previous communities combined, but here I got that many with my first launch. I’ve grown it to over 1,000 members, and almost $35k in annual revenue.
It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to happen, but once I let go of that and focused on what I wanted to happen, success started to unfold.
Even back in the day, the anthology that broke my career open, Monsters and Other Scary Shit, only happened because instead of writing my esoteric novels I asked people what they wanted (which was monster comics) and gave it to them. I didn’t really have any special love for monster comics, but I loved my audience, and I loved the creators, and my life has never been the same because of it.
Success isn’t a straight line. It’s a labyrinth. You don’t need to know how you’re going to get there. You just need to be ruthlessly clear about what you want, and willing to meet it wherever it shows up.
It’s likely going to be ugly. It’s probably going to look nothing like you planned. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t count or that it isn’t working. It just means you’re finally starting to understand the rules of this game.
