The myth of straight-line success

On J.J. Redick, Brooke Baldwin -- and me.

J.J. Redick has been on my mind a lot lately.

If you don’t know who J.J. is, here’s a brief primer.

He went to Duke. He played basketball there. He was outstanding. He scored 41 points against my beloved Georgetown Hoyas in 2006. (I was at that game!) He was the most famous college basketball player in the country. Period.

He was drafted into the NBA — 11th overall by the Orlando Magic.

And then, well, disappointment. For his first four years in the league, he never averaged over 10 points. He was largely written off — as a great college player but not much else.

The world moved on. There were other shiny objects. Athletes performing better. Redick was consigned to the dreaded “bust” bin.

---

This post is free for everyone. But I need your financial support to keep creating this sort of content. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It’s $7 a month or $70 for the entire year. Thank you so much.

---

Then, in his late 20s, Redick found something. He started to understand how and where he could contribute. From 2013-2020, he averaged 16 points a game. He was never THE star on a team but he transformed himself into a key cog.

And, since he retired from basketball, Redick has found ways to succeed off the court too. He is a very successful podcaster. (His pod with LeBron James is top-notch stuff.) He’s the lead color guy for the NBA on ESPN. And now he’s even reportedly in the running to be the next coach of the Charlotte Hornets.

What fascinates me about Redick is his path to success. It isn’t linear. Not even close. And there are major lessons in that — for me and, I think, for all of us.

Most of us — when we are young -- imagine our lives as a series of ever-larger successes. First I will get good grades in high school. Then I will get into a great college. Then I will get a kick-ass job. Then I will be a star at that job. Then I will be the boss. And on and on and on.

Sure, there might be a small setback or two on the way but, generally speaking, we imagine our lives will look like this:

A straight(ish) line success. Which is a pleasant way to think about your life. But, I find, not a useful or realistic one.

Before I get to me — and my life — I wanted to mention one other story that’s stuck with me. It’s that of Brooke Baldwin, a TV anchor who I worked with at CNN.

She left CNN in April 2021. And then, like Redick, sort of disappeared for a while. Brooke wrote about her exit — and what came next — in a moving piece for Vanity Fair that published this week.

Here’s what really struck me:

CNN was always the dream. For 10 years it put me in millions of living rooms, allowing me to cover everything from the White House to school shootings to the pandemic. I became known for giving you the news, straight up, with dignity and compassion. And—after the 10 years I spent climbing the ranks of local news to get to the big leagues—I was good at it.

I was living my dream and saying yes to everything. YES to oil spills. YES to elections. Coal mine disasters. Hurricanes. Escaped inmates. Gun legislation. Yes to everything, yes to everyone.

I never said no. There would have always been someone hungrier and more telegenic if I had.

Man do I feel that in my bones. I wasn’t a TV anchor — obviously. But at every level — high school, college, workplace — I thought that if I just did what I was told and achieved, I would be passed on to the next level.

I sort of thought of it like a video game. You had to navigate all the obstacles and beat the big boss — but if you showed the skill to do that, you moved up. You kept succeeding. Always and forever.

What Brooke writes about is that only in leaving CNN — the job she thought she had always wanted — could she find her real voice.

The end of her piece is SUPER powerful. Here it is:

Part of my own unraveling meant I became a believer in divorce. Including my divorce, so to speak, from CNN. Like my marriage ending, it was painful. I miss being a vessel for information and clarity and news—the good and the bad. I miss my audience. But I’m experiencing a rebirth. As with a forest fire, you can burn out the debris and foster new growth….

….Unraveling. A funny word. I always took it to mean “coming apart,” but it also can mean “getting to the truth.”

Now I realize it’s both.

The point there is that life is not linear. You don’t just keep moving from point A to point B to point C. And sometimes you do everything right, and still wind up not getting to that next level.

Which can feel like a failure. I know I have felt that way plenty of times in the 16 months since CNN laid me off. Like I had somehow let myself — and others — down. Like I was on this success path and then just, well, fell off (or, more accurately) was kicked off.

My guess — although I haven’t asked them — is that J.J. and Brooke felt like failures along the way too. Because they didn’t achieve what they thought they might. Because the expectations they had for themselves — and others had for them — didn’t comport with their lived reality.

What the last 16 months have taught me (and it’s clearly a lesson that J.J. and Brooke learned before me!) is that success in life really looks like this:

That is, stuff just happens. You start out on a path. It bends — usually not by your choice — in a totally new direction. You adjust. You see what the view looks like from the new path. Maybe you see something you’ve would have never spied if you had stayed on your original path.

None of that means that it’s easy. It isn’t! I meet with people all the time who ask me how the last year-plus has been. And I have learned that I can — and am — going to be honest with them. I tell them that, at times, it has absolutely sucked. Because it has!

But just because something is hard and/or unexpected doesn’t mean it has to be bad forever. Even in the suckage — is that a word? — opportunities exist if you are able to get out of your own way.

And, in order to do that, you have to throw away the myth of straight-line success. No one — and I mean NO ONE — really lives like that. We all struggle. We all see our path get diverted — we get laid off or we get ill or we lose a parent or we struggle with depression or we get divorced or we WHATEVER.

The point is to not fool yourself into believing that just because your arrow isn’t moving up and to the right you are failing. You are not. You are living.