When I was a kid I thought famous people lived in a different world than regular people. I figured that after Arnold Schwarzenegger made the first Terminator movie they issued him a special “I’m a Famous Person!” card that let him eat at special restaurants and fly out of private airports so he wouldn’t be mobbed by crazed fans on a daily basis.
I thought that fame, and the card that went along with it, made famous people like Arnold Schwarzenegger different than regular people—like he’d crossed a magical dividing line.
While elementary-school Ian was correct in that class stratification ensures that famous people (plus anyone with money) can live entirely different lives than the rest of us, the line between being Famous and being Not Famous isn’t that cut and dry. (For starters, I’m pretty sure there’s no “I’m a Famous Person!” card…)
Rather, fame seems more like a spectrum. The more people who know your name and the work you do, the further on the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Tom Cruise/Lady Gaga end of the spectrum you are. The fewer people who know your name and the work you do, the further on the Regular Joe/Jane Schmo end of the spectrum you are.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think there’s a magical moment when you cross a line and start being famous.
For example, was Tom Cruise famous after he made The Outsiders? He’d made a major Hollywood movie, but he didn’t have many lines and was mostly a background character. Was he famous after he made Risky Business? Definitely more famous than he was before, but I bet even then there were still a lot of people who didn’t know his name. I’ll also bet that after Top Gun came out there were still people who didn’t know his name—so was he famous then? Or just more famous than he was after Risky Business?
Think about some artists, writers, musicians, actors, and other creative people whose names you know, but that other people might not know. They might be more well-known that you are, but are they quote-unquote “famous”? A lot of synthwave fans listen to the band Futurecop!, but are they famous? How about Ursula K. Le Guin? Bret Easton Ellis? How about Claudia O’Doherty, Helen Frankenthaler, or Mike Birbiglia?
The more you think about the divide between being Famous and Not Famous, the more arbitrary and silly it starts to seem.
There’s a dangerous frame of thinking we can fall into about fame, where creative people hope and pray for that Big Success that will magically boost them up to a hundred million fans and earn them their “I’m a Famous Person!” card. Unfortunately, this is another way of saying that they’d like to suddenly get an “I’m a Successful Creative Person!” card that separates them from all the other, Non-Successful Creative People. This might just be because they just really want fame, or it might be because they want a measure of what they’ve achieved.
Instead of pushing ourselves over arbitrary measures of success, we’d all be better off thinking of fame and popularity as a spectrum, where creative people put work out there and other people appreciate it. Some creative people of course have bigger reach with their work than others, and the more people know you and your work, the greater you can extend your reach with a new project.
That’s why it’s really important to keep putting out new work, and why that’s something I really want to focus on. I don’t think of myself as belonging to a spectrum of Famous vs. Not Famous or Successful vs. Not Successful. Rather, I’m a creative person who’s done some projects and extended my reach just like all the other creative people out there, and that’s the way it’s always going to be.
There’s no magic project I could do that would make me an overnight success to the point where I suddenly became Famous. Rather, even if I wrote multiple books that sold millions upon millions of copies in a Stephen King-sense, I’d still be working toward the next big project that would extend my reach and help me share my work with more people who didn’t know about it.
It’s also not good to quantify some people as being Successful or Famous, because that frame of thinking places other people in the Not Successful camp…which sounds a bit like the Failure camp. I don’t want to be seen of as a failure because I’m not Lady Gaga-level Famous, and neither should you.
Final Thoughts
If this post has resonated with you in your struggles as a creative person, you might think more about what Fame and Success mean to you, and how your pursue them. Do you see them as a spectrum, or do you draw a line in the sand, with some people on the more successful side and other people on the less successful side? Does this mindset affect how you view your creative work?
And as always, feel free to share your thoughts in the Comments :-)