Sometimes, Remind Yourself
I told Eli 18.7 to never confuse ambition with failure.I didn't tell him this until a few months ago, because I never thought about it before. It would have been really, really helpful to pull that out when he was going to NAHL camps at 16, or when he applied to five Ivy League schools and wasn't accepted.
Sometimes you only eventually know the right thing to say.
It's a good description of Eli's life, though. He's incredibly ambitious, and usually, that ambition has paid off. When it didn't, I think he was much better off for trying. I hope he'll remember this.
I hope I do, too.
If I had known what I know now, writing a novel and having a literary agent at 25, even if the book didn't sell, was ambition, not failure. I needed to get into a writing program and learn, but I am so much of an introvert that I wasn't willing to do that.
So instead of digging in, I just wrote it off as failure, that I wasn't good enough. And I probably wasn't, back then, but that was okay, and I didn't see it that way. I saw it as an end, not a start.
It should have been a start.
Instead, I still wrote, and even finished a few things, but there was always this lack of real commitment. I couldn't quite see past what I thought of as failure to really invest myself, because I didn't want to be disappointed again.
I've been reminding myself of this quite a lot lately, as I just grind through the last seven chapters of this rewrite. Even if this thing lands in the market like a pile of soggy leaves, it's ambition. It's not failure.
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