I’m not traditionally successful. I think if people looked at my potential in high school and where I’m at now in my career, they might think “what a waste.” (On the other hand, if they knew about my family situation, they might be more supportive.) People assured me I was really smart and I’d go far.
Too right, I know that feeling. People used to tell me in general and secondary school that I was smart. Now I sometimes find myself thinking, “If I’m so smart, why am I not in a better place in life?”
Well, if we’re going by corporatist standards of success, being smart can help, but it ain’t the end all be all… and there are different tiers and kinds of smart. Being a 1-in-50 intellect might be enough to impress the middle two thirds of the population, but being a 1-in-50 intellect in the US means there are more than 6 million people in the US who are just as smart or smarter, and even being 1-in-1000 puts you in a group more than 300,000 strong… and very high IQ often comes with drawbacks(High IQ seems correlated with higher risk of mental illness, High IQ individuals often struggle with interactions with mid-range IQ folks, gifted studentsoften coast by on raw intellect without learning good study habits and then shut down when they hit a wall and often end up challenge adverse, etc. And of course, luck plays a part, as does opportunity, confidence, and motivation… My estimated IQ puts me at about that 1-in-50 level and I have a degree in Computer Science, and the starting salary for a junior software developer is about three times what I draw in SSDI, but there are no tech jobs in this small, middle of nowhere town I find myself trapped in, I’d need a good job to be able to afford to move somewhere with better job opportunities, I worry that even if I managed to find a halfway decent job, my blindness and my slow listening would prevent me from keeping up with sighted coworkers, and with how much I struggle to focus on personal projects and how little I liked online classes in college, I feel like accepting a remote job would be a disaster waiting to happen.
Do consider it a pretty big success that I’m able to live independantly and managed to finish a bachelor’s degree despite going blind part way through my college career.
@Mewtamer Having a job where you’re not in direct competition with coworkers sounds like a good fit for you. You’re pretty grounded and patient. You’d probably make a great tutor or teacher’s assistant… maybe a councilor.
Too much of a good thing can be detrimental in pretty much every aspect of life. Thank God I’m not a genius, but I’ve often thought that I might be too good looking. Perhaps that’s what has held me back in life. Yeah, that must be it…
Yeah, gifted children in the 80s and 90s seem to end up struggling in “life” ™ a lot.
I think a lot of us are neurodiverse (I am not diagnosing anyone here! But yes I’m autistic and proud of it) so we thrive at academic stuff but the social side of pretending to be perfect in interviews and giving pointless markers of respect to clearly stupid bosses… is much harder. And just dealing with neurotypical people all day, every day in a classic work situation is really really hard.
Also, gifted people are often super creative, and creativity (like, say, being a game dev or author) does NOT correlate with monetary success. In fact it often ruins success, because a lot of our heart and mind goes into creative stuff instead of work stuff.
And then there’s the “I’m smart so I don’t learn how to study or to persevere when I don’t grasp things instantly” phenomenon that’s been written about in this thread, plus the pressure inherent in the idea that, “Oh, you’re gifted so your life will be AMAZING”. And the harsh reality is that adult life is mostly just working at an okay job for someone else. No matter how gifted you are.
Which is added to all the economic stuff where a lot of us are “less successful” than our parents eg can’t buy a house because they cost 5x as much in terms of real worth… and we feel like failures many times over.
Which often contributes a lot to mental health stresses (both the financial struggle side and the confusion that we’re working hard yet worse off than our parents so are we just lazy??), which again make everything harder.
Wheeee…
Yeah, my kids are gifted but I don’t label them that in their hearing and I don’t put them in advanced classes. Because it often does more harm than help in the long run (having said that, a lot of gifted kids need other gifted kids to connect with socially on their level, so classes/programs can help with that a lot).
I have to constantly remind myself that it’s harder to get by financially these days than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. Because we unconsciously adopt our childhood model as ‘normal’ and it’s very hard to get past that. Especially when a lot of baby boomers genuinely believe that later generations are just not trying hard enough.
So, markers of economic success are harder to reach now. We’re simply playing in a more difficult game. (Especially if there are other factors, such as being any race other than Caucasian, or disabled, or neurodiverse, or gender diverse, or even just female…)
I can relate to this. I grew up in special ed in the 80s yet also was told by my mom that I was “so talented.” And the idea of like, if I’m so smart, why can’t I do [thing] still haunts me. I can’t imagine how bad it’d be if I grew up feeling I was gifted instead of, well, an ableist word I was called by all the non-special ed kids that I dislike even typing…
Honestly, I’m convinced neurotypical is a thing that doesn’t actually exist in any meaningful way.
Not sure I’d enjoy it, but I could probably handle an office job where I can sit in a dark cubicle and mostly crunch numbers and organize data and only occassionally have to attend meetings, but most of the office work around here is in a customer facing capacity such as receptionist or requires domain specific expertise in a specific area I’m largely unfamiliar with(such as medical record keeping or accounting).
Though, I’m quite glad my SSDI is enough that I can at least make ends meet without having to work myself half to death in retail or food service(which seem to be about the only jobs around here that don’t either require a degree in a different field from the one I have or a driver’s license).
Edit: and in case it isn’t obvious, I was one of those gifted students… well kind of. I feel like I didn’t truly learn to read until I was 10 and I always kind of struggled with history, but I had a knack for numbers, technology, and the natural sciences from the get go, and after learning to read, I quickly became the fastest and most voracious reader among my peers in middle and high school… but I struggled with essay writing well into my college career, could never really handle a full-time course load in college, and while I blazed through the HS math curriculum, most of the undergraduate maths required for computer science gave me some trouble… and if I’m honest, I finished my degrees mostly out of a refusal to give up(Graduated HS in 2005, flunked out of a major university my freshman year of college, transferred to a local community college for 06-07, completing about half of an associates in applied science in Computer Programming with a 4.0 GPA before learning AAS degrees are a bit of a dead end for those planning to transfer to a 4-year school, switched to an Associates in Science pre-major for 07-08, got largely crushed by a full-time course load then spent three more years attending community college part-time before graduating in Spring of 2011(though I picked my last few electives so I could also complete an Associates in Arts pre-major and an associates in General ed at the same time… for 2011-12, I went back to the University I flunked out of… where they held my bad grades from my freshman year against me and I found myself in a situation where the only way I could afford to attend was as a full-time student, but the only way I could get grades good enough to graudate was as a part-time student… withdrew, went back to the community college thinking I’d finish that AAS in Programming to have some good, recent grades to show to the local university I could actually afford to attend without full-time financial aid, and Fall of 2012 was when I underwent retinal reattachment surgery to try and save the vision in my left eye, ended up ditching the AAS in Programming plan as the transition from one working eye to blindness lead to me failing a database class I’d have to wait a year to take again… Finally got my BS in Computer Science in December of 2016 after over a decade of college… and then in may of 2017, I lost my father and with him the only real support system I had left… I graduated debt free, but as me and the rest of my father’s survivors adapted to the loss of his income, I accumulated over 10 grand in debt that I’ve struggled to hold still on ever since… did attend a voacational rehabilitation program through Division of services for the blind for the 2017-18 school year, and they did find me an internship(another mistake I made during my college years that I found out too late to really do anything about is the importance of internships, so I ended up spending most of my summers taking clases to try and make up for not taking a full course load in the fall/spring) that could’ve been a stepping stone to meaningful employment, but that internship fell through because the employer didn’t like some of what they found when they googled my e-mail… and by the time I had done what I could to scrub those things from the internet or at least make it everything non-essential shutdown, and the whole shelter in place recommendation only fed into introversion and living somewhere with few reasons to get out of the house… Though, I’d would probably re-enroll at the local community college for the fun of learning had I the spare funds to do so.
When I graduated back in 2008, I had to give an “exit interview” about my future plans with one of my college advisors. She was speechless when I told her that I planned to just do menial labor at a grocery store. Earn enough to survive, and have free time to write: that was always my goal. I operate on a tight budget, and my living situation has been called “meager” by certain family members. But I’ve never wanted to be rich and famous.
Nowadays, I’m not working in a grocery store anymore. I still have a tight budget, but I’ve been able to financially support myself for almost a decade as a freelance narrative designer. The work I’ve done for Fallen London is some of my favorite. It’s great to know that my writing has had a positive impact. Brightened someone’s day. Helped someone think about the world in a new way. Inspired people to make their own art. Some of my games have been included on university curricula, which is pretty wild.
The downside to achieving this sort of professional success is that I’m unable to spend as much time on personal projects. The vast majority of my creative energy now goes into client work. But as far as problems go, it’s a good one to have.
Then don’t. I think comparing yourself to others is a really dark path for anyone. I used to do that until I realized there will always be someone better than me. If not at school level, then on regional level, if not there than on state level, if not there then on contry level, etc. And those that are on the top of the world realize they have reached their goal, so now what? The problem is they are still not happy: for proof, we can see all those movie stars or rock stars with lots of money but with their personal lives in shambles, with drugs and whatnot.
The path to happiness is actually to not compare yourself to others. Just do better today than what you did yesterday. Compare yourself to your yesterday-self to today. Did you do something better? Learned something new? Is today you a better version of yourself? From personal experience I think that’s a much better metric.
As for work-place competition: that’s really foreign to me. I know things like that happened around me, but I never cared if someone was more “successful”. I mean, if you take the above philosophy into account, the fact that someone was more appreciated by the management, I tried to learn why and learn from it. If the reason was nepotism, then well ok, nothing to gain from that. Frequently, though, learning from those people helped in gaining technical and communication skills.
All that said, it really applies to my experience and yours may differ significantly. So, first, a disclaimer: I live in a small country in EU. For us, talking about disabilities seems less of a taboo than in the US. So, please forgive me, if it’s too forward or offends in any way. Have you considered that your disability might actually be a beneficial differentiating factor? Consider: a lot of companies nowadays are seeking compliance to people with disabilities. If you could help the companies achieve that compliance, as an outside consultant, maybe they would be willing to take you on? Well, either way, I wish you all the best.
This sort of veers off into ad-hoc self-help and catharsis and gets back to the main topic eventually, but …
I think it’s a sort of trap … I remember there was a lot of competition at school for grades. A lot of smart kids would play dumb and make other smart kids feel bad about “being so smart.” I remember one who would pull that a lot but was #3 in a graduating class of 500+. I felt ripped off when I found out.
(Note: I’m still grumpy about how there were a few people in high school who were jealous of my intellect. They however were quite smart themselves and had a much better support network. I felt guilty I was smarter than them for a while. Then I felt guilty I never tried to like them. Shaking this off was a success. And realizing I didn’t “have everything to succeed” and, in some cases, bad actors pushed me away from it, gave me relief.)
Also I remember a lot of times I’d ask a question and hear “you’re so smart, you should know that.” Or “you’re so smart, don’t hog the help/tutoring from people who aren’t as smart.”
So when I hear “sooo smart” I often take it with a grain of salt: the fact is, I had a huge blind side of how to deal with social situations. Part of that was my family not teaching me that or saying “school will be enough.”
I think what really hurt was the various degrees of implication that someone interesting and social like them would be able to use my smarts better than I would – and they neglected that I got good at certain things precisely because I had an idea I needed to make up for a lack of social stuff. I wasn’t smart at detecting bad actors! The Internet has a bunch of information on that that has helped me so much. It’s rather subjective, but once I get evidence from 5 sources that Person X may have been more than kind of a jerk.
I also think I’ve been successful fighting against “oh, you didn’t DESERVE that good fortune” feelings, which was to some degree in my original post. But saying, hey, I came up with a good idea, and I don’t need its value to be quantified–that feels good. I feel like I can and should go on to the next one.
Another thing that I fought against was a sort of Panglossian “you have everything you could need/want” which left me with a sense of dread “oh my god if I can’t succeed now.” I remember reading Candide for French, senior year in high school, and it was horrifying. It took me a while to laugh.
But it was also a revelation to realize people who said, shut up, you have what you want – if they were missing something, boy did they squawk!
There’s a line in NWA’s Dope Man (of all songs! No, really!) that really hit home for me out of the blue: To be a dope man, boy, you must qualify. Don’t get high off your own supply!
The issue here is not drugs but rather that the people who “helped” me would not take their own advice. They would complain about, well, anything. This Is America, I’ve Worked Too Hard, etc. Meanwhile, the person taking the bad advice may keep trying to apply it, if they are not observant, because the giver is successful, and perhaps the taker just hasn’t figured how to apply that advice right.
Fortunately I feel like I fight back against these bad feelings and memories even with small things. Like each time I google a question I should know and maybe one I even already knew, or I accept a useful answer from someone who’s being a jerk and know-it-all and compartmentalize their help versus their personality.
I remember the first time I googled a question, clicked the link on StackOverflow, and realized I’d already upvoted the question! I felt dumb for a second, but then I realized, it wasn’t something worth memorizing. (Though I did put it in my general Python cheat sheet.)
It was a small victory. And being able to chain small victories like this together makes me less worried about if I am capital-s Successful. It makes me look forward to more successes, big and small.
As mentioned above there’s still some guilt over when a small success becomes a potentially big one, as if I didn’t deserve that good luck.
a mathematical way to think of this
This sort of thing can’t be quantified, but let’s say I try 100 potentially really good ideas, each with a 1% chance of working.
The odds I get 0 is 37%. That’s okay. Sometimes things don’t work out. It beats giving up.
The odds I get 1 is also 37%. I just shouldn’t be surprised when it turns up. There won’t be any flashing lights guiding me to which random idea works better.
The odds I get 2 is 18%. Not exactly terrible! Don’t expect it, but don’t be surprised. I just rolled 1d6 and got a 6.
The odds I get 3 is 6%. Not very likely, but if I have that good luck, I want to capitalize before the idea gets dull. Do I really want to waste energy wondering if I’ve disturbed the cosmic balance? (Perhaps I planned well or gained mental agility so the chance of working was 2%!)
The above is just a thought experiment that helped me. It may help others.
While I’m firmly in the cooperation is better than competition camp and believe that managers pitting their employees against one another just leads to a toxic, dysfunctional workplace, that isn’t the kind of situation I’m worried about, or at least no more than I would be if I still had a working eye.
I’m worried about things like:
-It taking twice as long for my screen reader to read me an important document as it takes the rest of my team to read that document visually. Assuming the document is presented in an accessible format.
It taking two or three times as long to compose an e-mail because of the constant need of having my screen reader read back what I’ve typed and not being able to use a mouse to immediately put the insertion point where I need it to correct a typo.
Needing to take several minutes to figure out the lay out of an unfamiliar website when sighted peers can start doing what they need to do immediately. ANd that’s not taking into account when the website does something wonky I need to figure out a workaround for.
Needing to experiment with a new piece of software to figure out the best way to navigate it, needing to learn it’s unique keyboard shortcuts when sighted teammates can just start using it immediately with mouseclicks or touchscreen taps, or at worse, they have to watch a short YouTube totorial that would be completely useless to me.
Needing to read data tables cell by cell and try to build up a mental model because I can’t see the charts and graphs summarizing the data.
And all the other little things that can add up to a blind person having to work twice as hard to get half as much done even in a setting that values collaboration over competition and actively fights against ableist thinking. It’s easy to imagine myself in a situation where I’m the smartest member of the team, but still the slowest because all the information my teammates are being presented and processed efficiently visually has to be translated into and processed through my much slower ears.
And doing consultation for blind accessibility is something I’d be interested in doing.
And yeah, not really interested in fame or fortune either, though it would be nice to have a stable income sufficient to pay off my debts, let me live a comfortable lifestyle, buy what I want from the grocery store and online and never have to worry about how much I have in the bank. Sadly, that’s hard without being in the right place at the right time with the right skill set and is only going to get harder as long as society clings to the notion that access to necessities should be gatekept by one’s value as an employee(personally, I’m in favor of a universal basic income sufficient to let people quit deadend jobs they hate and pursue their passions without having to worry whether they can actually make a living and so those who actually enjoy the kind of work most people only do because they couldn’t find anything better can demand respect from their employers without being easily replaced).
That’s it. That’s exactly it. I drew the short stick and spent school being the “smart one” with no friends and no clue how to make friends. It sucked. XD
As far as IF goes, people enjoy and review and discuss my work, and I consider that a success. I don’t expect to actually make money off it at any point, so that’s not my criterion, and while it would be amazing to take first in IFComp or a XYZZY award, I’m more interested in just…continuing to create things that people enjoy. The reviews and feedback are the best reward.
I’ve had a word coined after my pseudo, in the French IF community: stormisation. Which means breaking your game through beta testing. Actually only the older members remember this.
And I am known there for my systematic attempts at tasting the sun if there’s one in the game.
As far as authoring goes, in 20 years all I’ve produced are (all parser-based):
a small French IF that is not really fun to play
participation in making Lieux Communs in 2007, a French IF which was featured in a temporary exhibit in a museum. My role was mostly bugfixing and adding missing scenery and interactions.
Station Spatiale S16 Prologue, a prologue to what could become a bigger game if the base concept reveals itself as more than just a gimmick. I’m not sure about it. At least, the first puzzle on this concept was fun for some players.
Also I’m more a developer and a player/tester than a creative. Inventing worlds, plots and puzzles is very difficult for me.
I hesitated to make this post for the longest time, then did the math. Turns out, my first involvement with the IF community was two decades ago. That’s a good time to look back.
People welcomed me at the time, and gave me the chance to make contributions that mattered. That was a success. My few games, not so much, though with patience a few of them found their fans. Ten years of writing about code, authoring and the scene mattered even less. After much experimentation, one of my engines actually seems to be somewhat popular in the Russian-speaking IF community, though all I have to go by are itch/io traffic stats. That will have to do.
Does any of that make me successful? It’s the wrong question to ask. This hobby earned me no money, and little fame outside of the present crowd. But it’s something to point at if anyone asks. Having that sort of thing in life is not a given.
Like a friend said after I finished writing my one novel (that sold like ten copies total over eight years): look, you’ve now joined the exclusive club of people who actually wrote a novel! And a few years later I’ve helped two other friends do the same. How cool is that.
It’s great to hear everyone’s stories. This thread has been one of the most rewarding reads ever on this forum.
Comparing yourself to others in any sense is meaningless because there will always be someone born into a more privileged, or a less privileged situation. It’s like being in a race where some of the runners start closer to the finishing line than others.
Not only that, but with IF we’re often comparing apples with oranges: choice with parser, horror with comedy, puzzle games with autobiographical works. It makes rating games and voting in competitions very difficult for me. But in the end, finishing a game and being brave enough to release it makes every IF author a success.
I think of success like ripples from a stone you lobbed in a lake. Most people go through life without making waves. Creating games and lobbing them out there is one way to make a splash.
I’m in a similar position to Felicity. I’ve done some paid gigs through interactive fiction (indeed, some of the same ones she has). I’ve not made a mint, but it typically makes up about a quarter of my income. I suppose, with my stipend, I’m actually currently making almost all my income in IF, as I’m just finishing off a PhD in interactive narrative. (Though writing in an academic context is a lot more stressful than making games.)
I’ve found the critical engagement with my hobbyist works has been a lot more personally rewarding than the comparatively meagre attention from the commercial work: thousands of people have played my games, I have hundreds of ratings on the apps, but the works released for free in the IFComp have got the most interesting critical reviews. Even the most negative ones are engaged with the work in ways I have learnt from. That said, making interactive fiction commercially has pushed me to improve and develop new design skills. I wouldn’t have made a game as long as Lies Under Ice, and in doing so I developed a bunch of new approaches I can take into other writing.
When I was at university, I was in a club with other writers, most of them budding novelists. I often wondered how many would get published, years down the line. And the funny thing is, it’s possible I’ve been more successful than all (bar a poet)… but it’s not in a way that would be particularly legible to them. It’s like as if we all had hoped to become great explorers but only I got lost in the sewers and reached the caverns of the molemen, while they stayed sharpening their machetes and dreaming of the lost city of El Dorado.
