I recently applied for a job doing long-form content for a company that trains folks in how to use online stores. Great pay, interesting job, well within my wheelhouse in both the skill set required and the things I could learn.
It seemed like an incredible fit, and I received an invitation to take part in the next step within twelve hours of sending the application. They set me some tasks, asked me to listen to their podcast, and engage in a little exercise to help them filter the next round of interviews.
Which is where the wheels fell off for me, and I decided not to proceed with the application. Red flags popped up immediately as I reviewed their online content, but the thing that came through loud and clear was the through-line of their philosophy.
Again and again, they repeated the same message: Dial in. Hustle harder. Give everything you have to your online store and make money at all costs. Then they dropped the death knell: if you’re not succeeding, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough.
I tapped out right after hearing that because I’m familiar with the rhetoric of extreme productivity. I’ve heard it in the business space, and I’ve heard it in writing over and over. More so now, in the era of digital self-publishing, but it was always there.
So today I want to talk about the thing nobody likes to say out loud: you don’t have perfect control of your career. Even if you do everything right, there’s a certain amount of luck and — this is the important bit — privilege that’s involved in every success story.
Your actions can set you up for success, but they can’t guarantee it. Past a certain point, shit it outside your control.
The Curse of Capitalism
Capitalism believes itself to be a meritocracy. Good producers rise to the top of the market, while poor producers fall to the bottom. Consumers benefit because they get better quality goods for cheaper—producers are incentivised to work faster and cheaper.
In practice, capitalism is a rigged game, especially in these late stages where the rich are increasingly resembling a new generation of nobility with no sense of Noblis Oblige.
Yet even as governments around the world grapple with their citizens’ discontent with the current status quo, the insidious message of capitalism — that if you are just better, you will succeed — seeps into almost everything.
Writing feels like it should be safe from this. We are, after all, the form of art routinely undervalued and dismissed as something “anyone can do”, along with the usual malarkey about art being a gift instead of a job.
Even if that were true — and newsflash, it’s not — publishing remains a business, and the curse of capitalism’s belief in the meritocracy remains constant.
“We just want good books,” editors say when asked what they’re looking for in a submission, blithely ignoring market factors and setting up the same tautology. If publishers want good books, and they say no to yours, then ergo your book isn’t good.
“You’ve just got to have a backlist,” indie authors say, pointing to an extensive catalogue of work that brings in their regular income, heedless of the structural advantages that may come from when they started publishing, how much time they had to write, or even how much monetary support they could expect while reaching break-even levels.
Whenever a writer even hints at frustration with the state of their career, they’re inundated with advice about taking control. You’ve got to write more. Or write better. Or up your marketing game, or your blurbs, or your covers, or your promotion, or your social media platform. You’ve gotta persist through the bad times because writing is an endurance sport.
Never, yes, it sucks. This is a hard thing, and its complicated, and some things are out of your control, whether that be because you don’t have the knowledge or the resources or time to manifest success into existence right now.
I’m not immune to this impulse. I think writing’s an endurance sport, and “focus on the things you can control” is one of my mantras. And it helps if you write a good book, or you have a backlist as long as my arm.
But you can have those things and still fail, or even have less success than you want. Sometimes hustling isn’t the solution.
Hustle Harder Makes For Good Marketing Copy
Here’s the thing about acknowledging that not everything is in your control: it makes for terrible marketing copy. “Buy my course — it’ll teach you how to do this thing better, but there’s still a chance you can fail” is not an endearing promise.
We’re problem-solving creatures, and we love simple solutions to our problems. When faced with a complex point of frustration, the siren-song of “here’s an easy way to break past it” is hard to ignore.
Online marketing is full of people who identify a problem (indie authors don’t feel like they’re selling enough books) and offer a myriad of solutions: advertising courses, TikTok courses, blurb-writing services, full-fledged publishing support. Each of them promising their one thing will ultimately change everything.
It’s good marketing. Fiction writers look at those hooks and wish we could compel someone to try our stories as easily.
But here’s the thing about promoting a system or a skill-set that will change everything — especially one with a price tag in the thousands or tens of thousands — then you better be ready to defend it against people who do everything you taught and still don’t achieve what you promised.
“It’s you,” is a powerful—if fucked up—defense in those situations. “You could work harder. You could be a little better. You could do more to help yourself succeed.”
Pushing the locus of control back onto the customer is powerful because, yes, capitalism says we should be in charge of our own success, but also because we probably could have been doing more.
Could is a deceptive word because it focuses on what’s possible. I could strike it rich with the lottery tomorrow.
I could devote the next five years of my life to a rigorous routine of singing and dancing lessons, aiming to become the world’s most unlikely pop idol at 55.
I could agree with some rambling moron that Donald Trump is a figure worthy of idolization and that the long-term goal of getting a seat at Mar-a-Lago is a worthy ambition.
All these things are vaguely possible things that could happen. The odds are against them, but they are theoretically possible.
The real question is: are they plausible?
Fuck no.
The distance between could this happen and should is meaningful.
As I sat there listening to my potential employer’s podcasts, red flags accumulating with every passing minute, I heard them lean into the “you could do more” rhetoric harder and harder.
“You need to try harder,” they said. “You need to pro before you’re a professional. That’s how you rack up the numbers.”
Going Pro And Courting Prosperity
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life trying to “go pro” as a writer and publisher. I made life decisions based on whether they’d benefit my writing, or take away from it. I’ve quit good, well-paying gigs because they stole away my writing mojo.
I’ve been successful enough to get by, but I’ve never “made it” in a way that feels sustainable in the long term. I’ve caught some lucky breaks, and had gigs go sideways in unexpected ways.
Ask me to sum up my career in a single paragraph, and I’ll tell you I’ve lost far more than I’ve won. I’ve scrabbled by, forever just short of the next big break, but I take pride in the fact I’m still in the game. Persistence eventually wins out.
Writing might be a crap shoot in a hundred different ways, but if I worked hard enough, I could make it work. There’s a mindset espoused by Stephen Pressfield, author of The War of Art and Going Pro, that came up in the podcasts I listened to from my would-be employer.
It’s equal parts toxic masculinity and capitalist wishful thinking. Here’s a quick sample of it in action.
The amateur believes that she must have all her ducks in a row before she can launch her start-up or compose her symphony or design her iPhone app.
The professional knows better.
Has your husband just walked out on you?
Has your El Dorado been repossessed?
Keep writing. (Pressfield, Steven. Turning Pro (Function). Kindle Edition).
What Pressfield advocates for is a kind of ruthless focus on a singular task, setting aside all distractions and “shadow-careers” that pull you away from your authentic creative self. The Pro, he argues, gets the work done. The Pro shows up each day.
It sounds reasonable on the outside. Possibly even sane. Then you remember that Stephen Pressfield also advocates that being true to your creative impulses can cure cancer (see The War Of Art), which is a reminder that folks who say reasonable-sounding things can also be bug-fuck crazy.
Every time I hear folks waxing enthusiastically about Pressfield, I’m reminded of the strong streak of prosperity doctrine thinking that runs through a lot of self-help books aimed at business folks (and, for that matter, writers).
The Prosperity Doctrine is a philosophy that believes that God rewards the good with physical health and financial prosperity. Material wealth is considered a sign that you are in god’s good graces.
It’s got its origins in Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth, released in 1889 as part of his attempts to deflect blame for the Carnegie Steel Company’s union-breaking activity that involved Pinkertons and gunfire.
I would say something scathing about the fact that it’s the wrong-headed religion that can only emerge from America, but Australia twice elected a prime minister who belonged to the Prosperity Doctrine’s most visible modern adherents, Hillsong, and it went about as well as you’d expect.
The modern evolution of the Prosperity Doctrine mentions God a lot less, but pushes faith in Capitalism into the same role. It’s the same belief system at work: Capitalism rewards me because I’m good at what I do. It punishes people who are not good.
Or, in Stephen Pressfield’s world, good things come to be because I am faithful to art, and I’m rewarded for my faith.
All of which is patently wrong as fuck, and anyone who espouses it deserves a good kick in the head. Unsurprisingly, prosperity doctrine advocates I’ve encountered also tend to be terrible employers, lacking in boundaries and prone to magical thinking.
So you can see why I backed out of the application process the moment I caught a hint of it at work in my potential employer.
Walking away from that kind of pay packet wasn’t easy, though. Capitalism is hard-wired to promote “more” as a solution to all kinds of problems, and I was already thinking through how easy it would be to achieve things with that kind of money in my pocket.
It took a lot of journaling to figure out why I reacted so strongly to everything they talked about, and I realised that in this instance, more wouldn’t be better. Everything about the gig now screamed there would be unreasonable demands on time to go with the higher pay packet, and my own writing would be secondary.
So I said no, but it prompted a round of thinking on what I do want from a job. And from there, what I want from my publishing endeavours and writing.
I’m the Problem, It’s Me
The biggest surprise from this application wasn’t that I didn’t want to work for these folks. It was the realisation that I might not want to work for me anymore.
I’m mindful of the issues surrounding equating success and worth, but when you’re immersed in a culture that valourises that idea, being mindful doesn’t make you immune to buying into the idea subconsciously.
I rail against Stephen Pressfield and his entire philosophy of Going Pro, but like most things that I rail against the loudest, my problem isn’t that I think they’re wrong. It’s also the fear that they might be right.
Over thirty years of writing and teaching writing, it’s probable that I’ve fallen into the trap of advocating for the notion of being professional and taking control of your career.
Because sometimes that is the right advice, designed to spur people into focusing on things they can control that have a plausible chance of making an impact.
The whole notion of Going Pro has lost its charm over the last few years. It’s one reason I left freelancing and mentoring last year and went back to collecting a pay cheque.
Because you can control a lot in your career, but you can’t control everything. And one truth of writing is simple: you’re going to fail.
A lot.
For reasons that have nothing to do with you. For reasons which are systemic. For reasons you aren’t even aware of.
And if you’re working from a mindset of toxic meritocracy, it will drive you batty.
What Failure Is: Data
Foremost, failure is a data point. Think of it like the result of some vast experiment—I thought, if I did X, I would get Y result. Instead, I got Z.
That’s not a moral failing; it’s just information. Your hypothesis didn’t match the result.
In science, when an experiment fails, it’s not a moral loss but the starting point of an interrogation. Why a hypothesis fails can be as interesting as proving it, laying the groundwork for further exploration and experimentation.
I’ve spent a good chunk of this year focusing on fixing the next problem regarding my writing and publishing routine. A solid chunk of that is predicated on short cycles of trying something, examining the results with minimal emotional investment, and laying out new things to try.
Steve Kamb, author of How to Try Again and founder of Nerd Fitness, frames his process really interestingly: “Rather than help people succeed with more discipline, we help them fail with more compassion.”
He starts with the mindset that doing hard things is — unsurprisingly — hard and likely to result in failures when life throws you a curveball. Figuring out how to do something hard naturally involves falling short and failing, so figuring out how to go back to it after a failure is more valuable than any discipline you build.
He’s not interested in success; he’s interested in resilience.
Being A Resilient Writer
Resilience isn’t born of discipline and control. As Paul Jarvis says in Company of One:
The first trait that resilient people have is an acceptance of reality. They don’t need things to be a certain way and don’t engage in wishful thinking. Instead of imagining “if only this changed, I could thrive,” they have a down-to-earth view that most of what happens in our lives is not entirely within our control and the best we can do is to steer the boat a little as we float down the river of life. (Jarvis, Paul. Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business, p. 11)
They couple this acceptance with a sense of purpose and a capacity to adapt, but interestingly, Jarvis doesn’t include the key part of his Company of One philosophy as part of this framing.
His entire book rejects building a company that grows for its own sake, assuming “more” is the definition of success. His examples include multiple creators and business owners who have hit a specific level and stayed there, choosing to move value away from profit and towards retaining autonomy, maintaining work-life balance, and being happy.
He essentially starts by questioning the premise of capitalism and ensuring one’s definition of success is personal rather than cultural.
Writers, traditionally, are terrible at this.
Most of us don’t write for money, if only because the world around has drilled the knowledge that there is no money in art and writing into us for the bulk of our life. Yet ask most new writers what their goal is, without giving them a framework for exploring that question, and you’ll get the same suite of answers:
-
I’d like to be published.
-
I’d like to quit my job and write full time.
-
I’d like to be a bestseller.
-
I’d like to be read by a lot of people.
It’s a list with goals both vague and inaccurate, as I’ve been arguing since the publication of You Don’t Want To Be Published in its original blog post form in 2014. Most of us set the definition of success too high, and leave the parameters too vague.
Identifying what success means to us is hard, especially when it diverges from the omnivorous growth so beloved of capitalism.
The Failing Year
Identifying success may be hard, but identifying failure is quick and instinctive. I’ve got recent experience with this, as I failed much harder in the last eighteen months than at any other period in my life (which is saying something).
Returning to work was a failure, and returning to full-time work was a bigger failure still. Making stupid financial decisions was a failure, especially with the accumulated debt that built up through 2025. Failing to write more was a failure.
Failing to publish the Brain Jar books we had in development was the failure that keeps me up at night, fretting about the friends and colleagues I’ve let down amid the chaos.
I brought a lot of moral judgement to myself for all of this and beat myself up more than once. My journals through this period are full of self-recriminating commentary about the things I should have and could have done.
I could have hustled harder. I should have used money more wisely. I should have stayed calm when releases didn’t hit projected targets. I could have devoted more time to launching no-book revenue streams. I should have marketed more. Earned more. Done more.
I drove myself to “go pro” for three years between 2022 and 2025, telling myself I never wanted to go back to a “real” job.
That was a visceral reaction to my previous year of employment, running events through waves of Covid and having the job I took to get away from that end abruptly and with little warning.
I dubbed 2025 my failing year. I defined myself by the fact that my experiment with being a full-time freelancer hadn’t yielded the results I’d hoped.
Here’s what that mindset obscures:
-
I helped a bunch of writers level-up their game through mentorships, particularly through the Spectrum Writing program where I worked with emerging writers on the spectrum.
-
My first release of the year, What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains, was my most successful launch in years.
-
I put out another three books that year.
-
Some of the Brain Jar Press books we released in 2025 sold more copies in their first three months than other books have sold in total since launchin in 2020.
-
My spouse and I moved to a new place in a suburb we love that puts us in closer proximity to many friends.
-
I drafted a novella in one of my ongoing series. I got to write a lot of interesting stuff.
-
I figured out how to write around my new job (and the stories produced since going back to full-time work will be out over the next few months)
When looking at my 2025 failures as a data point, devoid of the emotional angst, there are more wins to the year than you’d think. Almost all the “big” failures are a compounding effect of non-writing and publishing problems hitting a critical point.
If I could have hustled myself out of the pit, I would have. It’s not like I didn’t try. In fact, it’s possible I tried too many things out of desperation, which largely made things worse. I had control, but I didn’t have the capacity — mentally or physically — to make smarter choices or achieve more than I did.
So What Do I Want?
One of the interesting things about stepping away from the interview process was the prompt to re-examine what I prioritise (time, respect, a job that stays within the working hours and doesn’t encroach on out-of-work commitments) versus what I don’t (money, the prestige of the role).
I’m far happier working my data entry gig, picking up a lower pay cheque but having the spoons to write around the job, than I would be with my days devoured by strategic goals and mass content creation.
My current gig is rock-solid in its recognition that work ends at the end of the workday, and doesn’t need to be taken home. I’m slowly seeing the fruits of my changing writing routine as submissions become publications, and long-stagnant publishing projects start picking up speed.
It’s not perfect — and it’s certainly not working on writing and publishing full time — but if work is a necessary evil, I’ll take the evil that respects my time and life outside of the 9 to 5 and doesn’t bang on about Trump and Jeff Bezos as positive role models..
I want time. I want predictability and stability in my working life. I want to work with people I like. Even the promise of an extra 40k a year wasn’t enough to sacrifice that (although it took a day of talking it over with my spouse before I really settled on that being okay).
Significantly, I make the same choices as a writer and publisher. Hustle for its own sake — or for the sake of earning money — holds no interest for me as a writer.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve tried it. I hustled hard through the first half of the 2020s, and at the end of it I sat down and said, “There must be an easier way to earn money.”
And lo, there was. I got a job — not even a particularly well-paying one — and my yearly income increased by about 35% percent.
There were easier ways to make money, which opened up different opportunities on the writing front.
None of this should be news to me. I gave my first seminar on being a part-time writer back in 2013. Back then, I noted that for all the rhetoric around “quitting my day job” being an ideal all writers pursue, I was actually far happier splitting my time with a job I liked and provided stability so I could have more freedom in my writing practice.
I’ve never run a seminar that had more people come up to me to talk further than that one, because there were a surprising number of writers who liked what they did outside of the writing front. They’d simply never been told that living on the ampersand — being a writer & something else — was a perfectly acceptable thing to do and didn’t mean they valued their art any less.
There are day jobs that would make me miserable, because they don’t want the ampersand to exist. They want to devour every waking moment of your life and throw toxic bullshit at you daily.
I have never wanted to quit and write full-time as much as I have while working those kinds of jobs, but in retrospect, the focus should have been on the first part. I wanted to quit.
Writing was just my default solution because, frankly, writing is often my default solution to things.
It doesn’t always make it the best one.
Nine months into working a regular job, I’m remembering the absolute luxury of sick leave and paid holidays, both of which disappear when you’re hustling for yourself. My writing — in terms of words produced and books approaching publishing — took an initial dip, but quickly picked up speed as I solved the problems around how and when to write (and then edit, and then publish).
I’ve got no desire to go pro right now. I don’t need to hustle to pay the rent, or know how I’ll pay off debts. It’s amazing how much writing you can get done when that shit isn’t dominating your mental bandwidth.
For the first time in a long time, I’m not driven to do more. Instead, I’m driven to do things right, to make each project meaningful, and to derive fulfilment from the process instead of the results.
BREAK THE BINARY
So, a confession: the hustle-mind that dominated the last few years of my life kicks in at this point of an essay, demanding that I pull together a call to action that offers people a next step they can follow.
That’s non-fiction hustle 101—stake out your terrain around a problem, then offer a solution to potential readers, preferably free but leading them towards a higher-paid service.
Offering solutions increases links and clicks, which increases your potential audience and pulls in more readers.
Offering solutions positions you as an expert, and one worthy of spending money on.
It’s a habit that’s hard to break, not least because there’s always the possibility I will need to hustle again in the future. I like my job. I like the writing time it affords me outside of my work hours. And after thirty-odd years in the workforce, I’ve learned to take nothing for granted.
And I do still technically offer mentorships these days, through my Patreon, but I often forget they’re there. I write these essays because I need to hear what I’m talking about, and because I like the idea of helping people find a better, calmer path through their writing career that I had.
I don’t need to hustle these days. I made decisions so I wouldn’t have to.
But that assumes that there are only two modes: hustle and not-hustle. It feeds into the essential problem of talking about writing careers, where we erect binaries and assume only one thing is possible. You write to create art, or to create entertainment. You plot or you write by the seat of your paths. You want to earn money from your writing, or you do it for the love of it.
In truth, those binaries are never clear. Artists need to exist within capitalism, which means figuring out how to pay rent and buy food comes into the equation somewhere. They need money to cover supplies, and the time required to create new work.
To deny that commerce is something all artists need to think about at some point is to set up a situation where only the privileged few can be “real” artists, because they come from money, are sponsored by money, or marry into it.
So here is my takeaway for everyone to think about: take a good look at your writing career and pick something that isn’t working as well as you’d like. It can be a project that’s stalled, financial targets that aren’t being hit, or a practice you’re not happy with.
Then ask yourself a few key questions:
-
What assumptions am I making around this thing that shape the way I work?
-
What binary, black-or-white thinking in my attempts to find solutions?
-
If we disregard the history behind this particular thing that isn’t working well, and take it only from a place of starting today, what could be done to bring you closer to the writer (and life) you’d like to be?
Learning to set aside what we think should happen, and think about the possibilities available to where we’re at now, is one of those key habits of building resilience that is perpetually underrated.
Really, though, my key message is simple: Going Pro is bullshit. You have less control than you think. Stop beating yourself up for not being where you think you should be, and write some things you enjoy.
Writing careers are hard enough. You don’t need to make them harder.
Leave a Reply