Nonfiction | January 05, 2015
Some Notes on Success
Daniel Torday
What did it mean to be twenty-four? I would like to know how I would have defined success. I know what I desired: to be a rock star and a twenty-four-year-old novelist, in that order. But success is not simply the fulfillment of desire, and I was not yet a rock star or a novelist. I was, after all, twenty-four. I was an editor at a national magazine and a bluegrass mandolin player, both of which were like what I desired, and not. I was living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and working in Midtown Manhattan. I was full of ambition. I had not the slightest inkling of how to get what I wanted.
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