Embarrassment Is Not Real & The Opinions of Your Unambitious Peers Rarely Pay Bills
They haven’t even tried, what do they know?
So I ask you…What does success mean to YOU and how do you measure your milestones?
A conversation about the subjectivity of success, what constitutes a meaningful milestone in pursuit of a dream, and the lost art of minding the business that pays you.
I'm from Atlanta, also known as The Black Mecca, where everybody is bold, brave, and believes they're God's flashiest gift to creation, as well as natural-born small business owners. I use the terms "business" and "owners" loosely when referring to some of the residents in the land of illegitimate LLC's but I digress. Right or wrong, good, bad or indifferent, I love my people so…you know what, As we should ! We gave you MLK, the latest Little Mermaid, Nene Leakes, and hot lemon pepper wings; that's pure inspiration, babes. So if you want to talk about dreams…talk to someone from the 404.
Regardless of the reputation we've garnered for ourselves in recent years, there is no denying the opportunity for Black excellence that exists here. Our rich history of change-makers paved the way for that possibility and set a standard for success worth striving toward for Black people across the globe. My father is a perfect testament to the power of their impact and their influence over the global Black citizen. After growing up in Nigeria, at age 18, he left for Italy to attend college and begin his working career. I always used to say he could've gone anywhere in the world after graduation, could have simply remained in Tuscany, but chose to migrate to Atlanta, GA, of all places…why?
His answer: Martin Luther King Jr.
I'm not even exaggerating; that was his response verbatim, and to him, it was a no-brainer. My father had a dream of his own to build a family and a lucrative business in a community where everything he held dear would be safe to prosper — and that's precisely what he did. So, the older I get, the more I understand the simplicity of his answer. MLK solidified Atlanta's legacy for being synonymous with 'the freedom to succeed even if you're Black, Brown, White, or any hue in between'. Now, is that the truth in reality? Every American city has its disparities, corruption, and attempts to hold on to the ways of old, and Atlanta is no different. But that is not the central topic for today's discussion.
Today, we're talking about the subjectivity of success through the lens that raised me, how we come to measure meaningful milestones once we define success for ourselves, and the illustrious lost art of minding the business that pays you while embarking on your pursuits.
What is Success?
Before we go any further, let's define success. According to Google, success is formally defined as "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose, the attainment of fame/wealth/social status, and the good or bad outcome of an undertaking." The good OR BAD outcome of an undertaking. Remember that.
Now, according to the suburbs of Atlanta (where I grew up), true success has a subliminal flare. So instead of outright claiming to be God's flashiest gift to creation, you can define your success by mentioning what school your kids go to, or bringing up the beach/lake house you're able to afford because of what school your kids don't go to, or you say nothing and let where you frequent to do the defining.
This is what I assume suburbians call ~class~, so as you can imagine, this is a bunch that's got image curation down to a science, with only a hint of elitism to top it all off, but not too much. After all, we are a community of church-goers and volunteers. Regardless of which side of the white picket fence you stand on, this city taught me early on that you can be anything you want to be as long as you believe it, and you can dress the part.
Redefining Success
But what happens when you grow tired of pretending? When the wealth signals are signaling, but you're bored of the Moncler Morse code?
What happens when you wake up one day and realize that your personality isn't even your own, your goals and aspirations originate from a culture you don't identify with anymore, and so many aspects of your life reflect all the ways you've sacrificed your full range of authenticity in order to assimilate?
Do you pretend you don't notice? I mean, you can try, but what happens when you outgrow the front and want to be real, remember? How do you live beyond this caricature that all your "friends" and family have come to know and love? Do you even try to dismantle the mask?
I say yes. It all starts with getting real with yourself about what would make you feel as whole as you wish to look on the surface and then daring to tell the unfiltered truth.
The truth may not make you very popular at first, especially in environments where wearing a mask is considered peak polite society. It might even leave you excluded. But these rejections are a form of redirection. Authenticity is the ultimate filtration system. I hear it all the time because it’s true…what is genuinely for you cant find you as long as you’re pretending to be something or someone you’re not.
Some people prefer life behind The Mask; it’s safer there and comes with certain guarantees around acceptance and worthiness. Others find it itchy and difficult to breathe through. It’s different strokes for different folks. What might be a life of genuine contentment for some could be considered complacency for others. It’s natural to outgrow people, places, and practices. The issue arises when we believe someone owes us stagnacy out of a selfish need to keep them where we can reach them and vice versa.
A goal that centers around bettering ourselves, where we commit to breaking free from the cycles that have kept us safe yet small, is worth pursuing. Whether within ourselves or in a field, choosing to evolve is worth the effort. You are worth the effort of finding out if you can achieve it. Acknowledging an opportunity for change is the first step towards any success and, to me, is a meaningful milestone in and of itself.
Your Milestones Are Your Own To Define
Whether they do this consciously or unconsciously, I’ve noticed that people sometimes try to make you feel embarrassed for things they wish they had the courage and freedom to try or attain. Fortunately for us all, embarrassment is not real, and believe it or not, we can do and try whatever we want. Even an ego-shattering setback can prove to be a meaningful milestone in the long run.
I'm not saying you're never going to be or feel embarrassed just by holding it in your mind that embarrassment isn’t real. Being embarrassed can be helpful feedback at times, presenting opportunities for us to check in with ourselves. I’m more saying that how invested you are in the internal and external commentary surrounding those embarrassing moments and what you do with that commentary is entirely up to you. Like fear, the feeling of embarrassment only lasts for however long you leave it unaddressed, inadvertently feeding it with neglect.
Maybe give it a voice and see what it has to say. If it happens to be more cruel than constructive, then cut the mic. No one and no thing should have unregulated airtime in the radio station of our minds if all they’re going to do with it is pollute our worlds with unwarranted negativity.
Changing the channel can be a daily practice that supports us as we strive towards success.
Thus, learning how to feel the fear of judgment and the intensity of our limiting beliefs without letting them stop us from pushing forward…can become a milestone. A milestone we have the opportunity to celebrate every time we do it. It helps to have people invested in seeing you achieve your goals. So, if you can, find a friend, a real one, and share with them how you see success for yourself and what milestone you hope to reach in pursuit of that.
I think part of the reason my dad has been able to build an accomplished life and sustain it is his and my mother's emphasis on community. I don't know anybody else with as many friends as they do, and they're all over the world. It doesn't matter; he stays on the phone just checking in and sharing the journey with them, no matter which stage of it he met them in.
With their teaching, I’ve cultivated a community that supports my vision and ambitions which is undeniably a source of success for me. They bring value to every aspect of my life, and I knew this blog wouldn’t be any different, so I asked my friends to weigh in on this topic, and they did not disappoint. To quote my beautiful angel-faced of a friend, Lauren:
“It’s the small, seemingly insignificant accomplishments that really matter most. Big achievements are usually far and few between, or even years in the making. So, I think being successful every day boils down to happiness and appreciation for all the wins we take for granted. — Lauren Arapoff, DVM, Poet, Astronomer, Libra”
Could’nt have said it better myself. It seems to me that real friends, real supporters champion change. They evolve alongside you through each phase and stage of our endless transformations.
It can be hard discerning who or what is a safe space for discussing your aspirations and the strides you've made toward them without judgment. To which I say, trust yourself - words lie, actions lie, people lie, but energy cannot and does not lie. Feel the energy and be open to adapting by listening to your instincts. If it doesn’t feel like a safe space to share, maybe it isn’t one.
No matter the dream, using our intuition to achieve it can feel like using a God-given GPS system. We may not always be familiar with the route it’s guiding us down. Still, if we trust it, we can rest assured that we’ll arrive at our destination no matter the trolls we encounter on the road.
Sometimes, the biggest troll with the lofties riddles is your inner-defeatist. Especially when you see someone doing something you aspire to do, and they do it well. Your inner troll can use that as fuel to deter you from trying or to trip you up with thoughts promoting self-doubt. I'm telling you, this is one troll you do not want to entertain for too long. Let the way other people do what they do inspire you to discover how you can do it, too, in your own way.
The Lost Art of Minding The Business That Pays You
Never forget that envy and jealousy have many different faces, some of which are quite friendly, but all have mouths that love to speak on things they often know nothing about. Atlanta may be known as the hip-hop capital of the world, but it is our suburbs that could undoubtedly be in the running for the Yap Capital of the world.
Being financially secure leaves a lot of time to chit-chat, I suppose. I think it has little to do with malicious intent and everything to do with boredom. I, too, have been bored before. I, too, have yapped about all sorts of things I knew nothing about.
When someone begins to behave differently and challenge the systems we feel supported by, it tends to spark conversation. Even if that difference is them simply displaying their unique approach to building a life or making a way from themselves, if it isn’t what we’re accustomed to it can be quite salacious to see in action. Making their actions Yap material, if you will.
So that's the thing about the lost art of minding your business: it requires you to release the need for people to do as you do and believe as you believe in order for you to feel at peace in your place in the world. But with the all-access pass that the internet provides us into the lives of strangers and semi-strangers (people you met in the wild, swapped socials with, and subsequently never saw again) — it makes it very easy to invest in lives other than our own.
It also opens up the door for envy, which is the energetic signature of losers in my book, and I'm going to explain why.
Our time on earth is limited and precious. You can do anything ( if you happen to live in a part of the world that doesn’t actively infringe on your basic human rights and force you to adhere to a specific ideology or else — just walk with me here) and be anyone. You can use your mind to be imaginative and creative in any way you like. You can make music, write fiction, do live-action roleplay, knit on a park bench, send letters to your representatives to advocate for policy change, ponder the nature and reality of the universe, or whatever else your mind, body, and soul urge you towards.
So, to spend your time and your mind power on envious or jealous thoughts/comments, regardless of who they are directed towards, to me… is pointless.
A waste of precious time. Basically, it's the same as leaving your car running in the driveway with nowhere to go, just emitting hot gas that is bad for the environment.
I'm not about to sit here and act like I no longer talk about people on the occasion. I'm a quick-witted southern Black woman with more aunties than I know what to do with and a diagnosed mood disorder. I have my moments. Sometimes, I slip and fall into a shady comment…
It's okay to admire and be inspired, but when admiration spoils into envy, jealousy, or an insatiable yearning for someone else’s life, you've got a problem. I’m not judging anyone in this space, especially Americans who were conditioned to believe entitlement to what isn’t theirs is manifest destiny urging you to reach out and take it. What I’m hoping to accomplish here is to cut through the delusion that this frame of mind encourages. Some of us really need to hear that it (whatever it is for each us) isn’t better just because it’s someone else's.
Oftentimes, we want people's successes and blessings without fully understanding the burdens that made them built to be blessed in the first place. Take my dad for example; there are some who, if they met him later in life, could say, “I’m trying to get like him…I want the life he has”. Not realizing, he lost his mother to cancer at 15, hasn’t been able to return to his home country since he left it almost 50 years ago, and carries countless other struggles in silence. It’s a journey marked by adversity and the relentless pursuit of the dream MLK seeded in his heart as a child.
He didn’t want what someone else had, he wanted what he knew he could build for himself if he focused on his dream and the road to reaching it. This the lost art of minding our own business in practice. It comes with numerous sacrifices, which is why I find the American attitude of entitlement reinforced in our media and cultural practices to be so feverishly deluding. It’s this expectation that we should be able to gain without personal loss, but that isn’t reality. Both loss and failure are fundamental parts of life and excellent teachers if we can humble ourselves enough to embrace them.
Through them, our successes become more meaningful, and our sense of gratitude reaches greater depths.
In the end, the most valuable opinion is your own.
Success is directly informed by what you value. When your values change, so should the way you measure your progress and achievements. But as we learned in the beginning, with success, it doesn't actually matter whether the outcome is good or bad. You just have to try in order to be considered successful in your pursuits. So, try not to compare your outcomes and output with the ones of your peers. Contrary to conditioned belief, we are not all operating under the same blueprint. Who cares how long it took them? What does it matter if your values differ from somebody else's? Or if your interests seem strange? We have enough of the same. Be weird, take your time, let yourself change, and know you can associate without forcing yourself to assimilate.
So, if you're unmarried with only a GED and a dream, working at Chuck E. Cheese but for the first time in your life, you're not dependent on any kind of substance (vaped or otherwise) in order to get through the day and that's what makes you feel like a success…then you're a success baby!! You're doing laps around the majority of us tbh.
If you're dating the partner of your dreams, and the magnificent truth of all that they are and all that the two of you get to be with one another makes you feel like a success every time you look into their eyes…then first of all, aw <3. Second, YES, you're also a success!! Get the picture?
It's not up to your boss, your parents, your critics, what he said, or what she said. It's what you say and how you stand on it because your word is Law in the context of your own life. You're free to decide how to define these things based on what they mean to you, and they still be VALID. It's your journey. It's your process.
So if someone tries to argue about what's relative to your life, put your big Atlanta girl panties on, be bold, and be brave when you tell them you're not looking to form any more unholy alliances. It's loser behavior to argue about a vision you can't see and to argue the details of a process you haven't been privy to.
It seems to me as long as you're perceived as victorious, you can expect attempts to undermine and take away what's been won. Not everyone knows how to act around things that shine, but ultimately, no one can take what they can't reach. Here is where self-love becomes the best form of insurance because when all your prized possessions exist external to you… there's always a chance they can be up for grabs.
These days, my perspective feels like my most prized possession. It's as much inherited as it was hard-won, and with it, I now understand that my milestones are my own to define. My milestones are my own to interpret the meaning around. I don't need formal institutions to inform me that I've accomplished something worth acknowledging and celebrating. Especially not when those institutions have a history of revising guidelines and moving the goalposts at their frequent convenience.
Every time I wake up and remember to make my bed, I feel successful. Whenever I push through moments of panic and still complete a task, I feel successful. Every time I let myself fail and don't let it define my inherent worthiness of the success I desire…I feel successful. Every time I can breathe through my nose without obstruction, I feel successful.
If you know me, you know I am the most chronically runny-nosed person…
Mistakes are inevitable, failure is imminent, and you’re going to be embarrassed at some point or another. That’s the truth. But you want to know what else is the truth? The miracle of creation isn't a guarantee, and yet here I am, all created and shit. Why? Because my daddy decided to sail the seven seas with nothing but a dream of what could be, a hair pick for a now long gone afro, and the impulse to just try. Do you know how much that rocks? I could've been anything or nothing at all, but I still came out as a Nubian princess with a family that would do anything to see me shine, beautiful friends that dream their own dreams alongside me, a deep reverence for the city I grew up in, keen intelligence, sharp intuition, legs for days, a heart of gold, and a God that loves me enough to work hand and hand with me in everything I set out to do. Literally, what more could I want? Not to mention being the answer to the prayers of my ancestors. Sounds pretty damn successful if you ask me. So now let me ask you:
What does success mean to you and how do you measure your milestones?
