About The History of Success
Post 615:
I had a funny exchange with a fellow musician the other day. We were talking about a guy who used to be just another dude who’s really famous right now, having blown up over the last few years. One of us said something like, “Yeah, things working out.”
I believe my last opinion on the matter is that things working out sounds more like a fairy tale than the simple product of hard work and determination and good fortune.
We laughed, because I was joking. Mostly.
Really, I’m lucky to make a living as a musician, and yet, the big prize—the brass ring—the banners and swimming pools in Hollywood—to me that’s something like being a modern-day nobleman. Epic. Unattainable. Apocryphal.
Nobility is like being big in entertainment. You can explain it to me, explain how it works, and I can understand. And yet, I find a portion of it baffling. Something gets lost in translation.
Let’s go with nobility. You hear these really simplistic explanations of how it started, like one guy was good at killing people and so he killed enough people to become king, and then the king found people that were almost as good at killing people to be his vassals, and he made them lords, and the lords protected the peasants and took taxes and fought for the king if it was ride or die time.
I’ve heard this explanation, and I guess it makes sense, but eh… it feels made up. At the very least, incomplete. Just because a guy got his hands on a sword and a piece of armor, the next 600 years of his family get to be ballers with auto rights, auto privileges, and auto castles just conferred upon them?
There has to be more to it than this. I get how it works and even works today, but the origin story is crap. This is how it sounds. Everybody’s poor in the Dark Ages, and one guy says screw it, I’m going to be rich. He starts bossing around a bunch of people and they build him a little building he can defend and he kills everyone that crosses up with him. He’s Jim the nobleman, and Steve and Rick and Bob and Julie and Cindy from work all just go with it.
I’m being stupid, I know. Feudalism. I read lots of history. So again. Feudalism. Because vassalage or patronage or patents of nobility or peerage or moats or armor or chainmail or holdfasts.
That was me saying words and having no real grasp of how it happened. Only that it did. That anyone becomes top dog in anything is miraculous to me. I’ll say that again to tie it back to the dude who’s now rocking the charts in the music scene. Miraculous. One day just a peasant like the rest of us, the next, got himself a castle.
I’m a literate person with an IQ in the high 80s—high 70s, and I just can’t connect the dots when it comes to basic historical principles and basic contemporary success stories. Feel free to call me an idiot, by the way, but I’ve never seen a person go from normal to noble. Not up close. I’m like doubting Thomas on this one. I need to slap eyes on it to be a believer.
The point is, I’m not very bright and there is very little hope at this juncture. Keep this in mind when you see me at the coffee shop and ask me about the new trade policy that’s kicking in and how it will affect the Suez Canal or whatever.
Leave me to my coffee. I’m a story guy for the most part. I can talk stories. You want Canal news, hit your local nobleman or noblewoman. They’re the ones over there, calling themselves noble.
Cheers and see you after.
