Living In One's Own Shadow: The "Thriller" Paradox

So many difficult questions emerge from the surreal life and sad loss of Michael Jackson. Here's one: What do you do when your greatest success is almost certainly behind you?

A lot of people have no patience for a question like this. "Oh, I'd love to have his problems." (For some reason, this line is best said out loud in a female Cockney accent.) 

But for anyone with creative ambition, the emotional aftermath of success is a very real part of life. If you're lucky enough to have any sort of audience for your work, it's overwhelmingly likely that one particular piece of work will be a popular favorite over the rest of your work. It may or may not be your best as you see it. But because of the timing and the zeitgeist and other unnameable factors, it will forever be your "biggest work."

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the mega-hit Eat, Pray, Love, spoke about this quite eloquently at the most recent TED conference.

So: How to live with the possibility that your best work is behind you, or at least that the public will forever think that your best work is behind you? 

It occurs to me that there are two different responses to this problem. Both are valid, and they're not nearly as mutually exclusive as they appear at first:

1. Face it.

2. Deny it.

On the one hand, any creative person has to accept the reality of creative peaks, and that one particular peak will always be the peakiest. As Ricky Gervais once said after the wildly critical success of "The Office": "Something has to be your best work."

On the other hand, it is the compulsion of any creative mind to constantly strive for something new and fresh; I don't think it is possible to be truly fertile without the conviction that your best work is ahead of you. 

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Comments

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I don't think it is possible to be truly fertile without the conviction that your best work is ahead of you.