Accomplishments per year
Lincoln was 56 when he died, which means that if I want to equal his legacy I have to really get a move on. (Image by Mark Thomas)
In the episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in which Conan interviews Lin-Manuel Miranda, Conan asks Lin about comparing his own accomplishments to what other successful people accomplished at a similar age.
Lin acknowledges this habit. “I think that’s an affliction many of us share.”
He goes on to point out ruefully that the Beatles had done everything they did by the time they were thirty. Meanwhile, Andrew Lloyd Webber, he says, had written three musicals by the time he was twenty-one.
There are two ways that the rest of us can go in responding to this.
One is to point out that if Lin-Manuel Miranda, for whom there is a Wikipedia page dedicated solely to his awards and nominations, feels inadequate when he considers the accomplishments of others, what hope do the rest of us have?
The other is to note that if Lin-Manuel Miranda feels inadequate when he compares his achievements to those of others, the whole thing is a story. The rest of don’t have to go to the trouble of trying for an EGOT; we can simply choose not to buy into the story.
Who knows why the Beatles were able to do what they did at such a young age? (Conan points out that there were four of them.) Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, does a pretty good job of explaining that they were born in the right place at the right time and practiced their buns off by playing shows night after night, all night long. They benefited from their circumstances and also made the most of them.
Have I? Have you? It’s an unanswerable question. There is no other version of either of us who worked harder or made bolder choices. There’s just the one we’re stuck with. Probably, we did the best we could.
So we can’t measure ourselves against ourselves. And if using someone else as a benchmark makes Lin-Manuel Miranda feel bad, then let’s not do that, either.
All we can really do is think about where we want to go from here. But even then, there’s so much we can’t control. People set arbitrary ages by which they hope to get married or have X number of children. You can’t predict that something like cancer or Covid is going to come along and foul up those plans.
All of us, even Lin, even Paul McCartney, face the gap between what we hoped for and what actually happens; the dream we had and the reality we must accept. Life can be ugly and unfair. “Accomplishments per year” is a poor way of quantifying the value of our days, especially when the resources that we are given at the start of the race are unevenly distributed.
Anyone who has ever compared their own career to Lin’s has to chuckle at the fact that he’s not satisfied, either. But that doesn’t mean that the bar for the rest of us must be higher still. It means that the bar is arbitrary. The bar doesn’t help us. Maybe it pushes some of us to try harder, but if we are going to continue to feel like we’re not good enough even after we win big, what’s the benefit?
I’m not saying that Lin-Manuel Miranda, MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is an insecure loser. I’m just saying that he’s human. Being a celebrated generational talent doesn’t magically resolve our unhelpful habits. We have to find a way to resolve those separately. Attaining incredible success will not prevent us from experiencing uncomfortable feelings.
Lin, like the rest of us, has a job to do. We all have to figure out how to be okay with who we are and what we have. It’s not glamorous, but glamor isn’t what’s needed. What we need is self-acceptance, a dose of perspective, and a sense of humor.
We may set out to achieve greatness, but we can’t be sure we’ll get there. Even if we do, it won’t fix us. That quest has to be separate from the work we do to be content with who we are and what we have. And we don’t know how many years we have left to put into either quest, so we might as well get cracking.
