We’re Not Worthy… Or Are We?
In yesterday’s post, I introduced an active imagination exercise as a way to access the images and ideas that are constantly flowing through us.
I also said I would use it to answer the question of what today’s blog post should be about.
The last image that came up for me was wide open spaces.
Since then, I’ve been letting that roll around in my head, coming back to it every so often and asking: What could that mean? What might this be pointing toward?
I think I’ve found my answer.
Wide open spaces speaks to possibility.
And today, I want to connect that idea to something very real—how we define success for ourselves.
Over the last day, I watched a handful of YouTube videos while doing normal life things—coffee, chores, the usual.
What struck me is that, even though they were all different, they were circling the same question:
What does it mean to “make it?”
The first video was a musician talking about how to have a career in music.
His advice?
Don’t do it.
He was funny, but he wasn’t joking.
He basically said that if you must do it, then:
Do it part-time and keep a better-paying day job
Teach music
Become a gigging musician—and then proceeded to explain how difficult that life can be
His point was simple: if you’re trying to pay your bills through music alone, the odds are not in your favor.
There are always exceptions. Unicorns. Lottery winners.
But you probably shouldn’t plan on being one.
I appreciated the honesty.
The second video was a short clip of Steve Jobs talking about The Beatles.
He said they were his model for success.
Why?
Because they were four highly talented individuals who, together, created something far greater than any of them could have produced alone.
They balanced each other. Covered each other’s weaknesses. Amplified each other’s strengths.
Individually, they were all good.
Together, they were something else entirely.
His takeaway: success often comes from great teams aligned around a common purpose.
Fair enough. Hard to argue with that.
The third video was an interview with Derek Trucks.
He talked about his journey, his career, and life on the road with a large touring band alongside Susan Tedeschi.
A few things stood out.
First, he said that the path he took into music may not even exist anymore in the same way.
Second, the amount of responsibility and stress involved in keeping a large band together is enormous.
And third—and this was clearly what mattered most to him now—he emphasized that, for him and his wife, staying together and raising their family was just as important as the music itself.
For him, it’s more than that now
That’s a different definition of success than what most people assume when they think of a “successful musician.”
By that point, I found myself asking:
Why would anyone choose to pursue a career in music or art?
What the heck am I thinking??
Why pursue something that is so uncertain, so demanding, and—by most conventional standards—so impractical?
Then I watched just one more video.
A young visual artist talking about her decision to pursue art instead of the more stable path she had studied in school.
At one point, she became emotional—she left it in the video.
She said something that really landed:
She didn’t necessarily have a “good reason” to believe it would work.
What she had was what she called positive delusional confidence.
She was choosing not to listen to the voice that said it wasn’t realistic.
And as she was talking, she was painting.
Interestingly…
The painting was of wide open spaces.
That’s when it clicked for me.
All of these people, in different ways, were talking about the same thing:
Making it.
And all were concerned about financial viability. That much was clear.
So here’s a question:
Who gets to decide what “making it” actually means?
Because if we’re being honest, most of us inherit that definition.
We absorb it from culture, from family, from peers, from whatever industry we happen to be in.
Money.
Status.
Recognition.
Stability.
That’s the default equation.
But “wide open spaces” suggest something else.
They suggest that those definitions are not fixed.
They suggest that there is more room here than we tend to allow.
More possibility.
More agency.
And maybe the real tension isn’t about whether something is realistic or not.
Maybe it’s about whether we are willing to define success for ourselves… or whether we default to definitions that were handed to us.
I’m going to come back to personal myths in tomorrow’s post and continue that discussion building off this a bit.
But for now, I’ll leave you with this:
Are you unconsciously accepting someone else’s definition of success for your life or your work?
And if money weren’t part of the equation…
How would you define “making it”?