I was just reading an interview of William Gibson done in the 1980s shortly after his immediate success with Neuromancer. And I was thinking of my ex-friend Chris, who packed it in on his writing and gave up to continue his computer science career. And I was thinking of 80s Metal Man, the online pseudonym of an American living in Britain who has written a novel that went nowhere commercially, one of a million amateur productions gathering dust under the limelight.

Is success hard? I think if you’re built for it, success isn’t hard. The question is, are you built for it? Jimi Hendrix became a famous guitarist and rock crooner in the Hippie Era and is a minor star in the history of celebrities because of his temporary success. Yet there are 500 Jimi Hendrixes who don’t have what it takes and who are retiring baby boomers today, eking out the last of their lives with the memory, they think, of something that could have been.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada was an amateur musician and former President Bill Clinton played the saxophone. Both men made their mark in politics, and have a reasonable place in history, but probably still dream of doing the musical thing for real. They will have never that success. They don’t have what it takes.

My friend Chris was weak. He never had the imagination to sustain a writing career. He “dabbled.” Stephen Harper “dabbled.” It is easier to make contact with something, and then slide away, than it is to lock on and embrace and grow.

Musician Prince, who lived a short life, made “Purple Rain” and “Little Red Corvette” and a handful of other popular ditties, and carved out a different image for himself. But he was unable to vault to a higher level of success. David Bowie, before he died of cancer in New York, leaving behind a daughter, flirted with popularity but remained a cult figure. Even William Gibson, who I referenced at the beginning of this article, stalled out after his first three books. I read his book Pattern Recognition, and it was a thick tome that had been slowly written, and it sucked.

Limited success is the best the vast majority of creatives can hope for. Yesterday, to kill time, I was reading Adolf Hitler’s Table Talk monologues, where he speaks on about a number of different topics. I didn’t read everything, just skimmed it. Hitler died in his bunker of suicide, yet has made it permanently into the pages of history as a major star. The 20th Century will be remembered as Hitler’s century and the computer’s century. The computer will have more long-term impact, but Hitler will have more drama.

So from the historical perspective, Hitler was a major success, not a limited success the way President Joe Biden of 2020-24 will be remembered as a limited success, but Hitler burned out and crashed and nothing he dreamed of came true. The most remembered man in history is Julius Caesar, and he also burned out and crashed, stabbed to death by political enemies from around Rome who didn’t want a king, and replaced by non-entities.

Life is funny. You can have no success, like my friend Chris and 80s Metal Man and countless other faceless denizens of the shadows, or you can have limited success, like William Gibson and David Bowie and a large cohort of others, or you can have major success, like Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, while dying useless deaths that may largely erase your accomplishments.

Human being are like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. They like to fantasize about making a difference, but history doesn’t care. Gigantic Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 40s are forgotten today. There is a wisp of a Bogart and a hint of a John Wayne but these blow away like white mist on a sunny clear day in San Francisco. Probably Brad Pitt will be remembered for a while because he was the prettiest. Tom Cruise will be forgotten. Jack Nicholson, who dominated through the 1970s, is already a balding, fat has-been, a Marlon Brando of nothingness.

The Beatles will be remembered. Elvis will be remembered. The crowds of youthful baby boomers will be remembered en masse during Flower Power times and the era of free love. But Hitler will be remembered more, and the computer will be remembered more. The Twentieth Century will be condensed down to five lines of poetry, and it won’t rhyme.

Who remembers the funny 19th Century? The time when Europe took over all of darkest Africa, conquering malaria, when the American Gilded Age happened and robber barons boomed after the defeat of the slave-owning South. The 19th Century was the age of maturation of technology from its tentative beginnings in 1760 as the nascent Industrial Revolution got off the ground. Napoleon issued a reward for anyone who could preserve food. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain are the only writers to survive the vast blast field of the 19th Century. Far more writers will survive from the 20th Century, everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Raymond Chandler.

The 20th Century expanded the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and created the Galbraith’s “Affluent Society,” a dreamlike time of long sharklike cars, and six-lane highways, and delicious home cooked food, and radio, and California idylls. The 21st Century is the 20th Century with cell phones and better computers. Google is the most noteworthy thing about it. All the music stars are dead as music record stores disappear from malls. Radio is clinging on, cheap to produce, about as relevant as piss on an elephant’s trunk.

The world is living in a Golden Age thanks to the existence of the Americans. The Yanks have saved the world and made it a democratic, racially equal place. White men have suffered massively in prestige, and the lowly woman has risen up, amazingly.

This Golden Age is not a Utopia, however. But there is still room for success in many fields. The important thing is that culture keeps evolving. People of the past always look primitive and funny, except greats like Hitler and Caesar. They stand out. Hitler was a thoroughly modern man. Caesar was a thoroughly modern man. He wore a toga and marched without armored personnel carriers, but he is full-rounded and human, understandable.

The list of historical celebrities is probably narrowed to about 50 men and 3 women. And many ignoramuses don’t even know about them, living only in the gauzy present. The typical writer will be read by a slender minority of readers and then forgotten, his books going out of print and disappearing from view. Who remembers a bestseller from 1890? Success is ephemeral.

Is it worth it to sacrifice everything for success? It is if you believe it is. As with most things, belief is the most salient feature around. A nation’s citizens believe in its existence and separate themselves out from other “citizens.” Children believe they are children, and act accordingly. Old people believe they are old, and act accordingly. Success lives and dies on belief, and time sorts the chaff.

Wayne Gretzky used to be a superstar, now he’s slow and finished. If he ever puts on skates, the memory of when he was fast and sharp must hurt him. To the Communists of today, and there still are some, the hopeless task they are going about is compounded by the memory of the glory days of the Soviet Union and Communist China. Everyone ages and dies and almost everyone passes from memory. Those who tasted success lived life best. Even a popular singer in Croatia had 3.9 million people who revered him. Roch Voisine will be remembered in Quebec as he crooned in French. Celine Dion of Quebec had international mega-success. Voisine had limited success, local and idiosyncratic.

The ultimate lesson is that life is fair. Adolf Hitler deserved to lose, but he also deserved to be the man the Twentieth Century gets named after. He was compelling in the same way that Elvis was compelling. His willpower vaulted him into the pages of history, even as his intellectual foolishness condemned him. William Gibson will never be one-millionth as great as Adolf Hitler, but his Sprawl trilogy, brilliantly fashioned out of nothing and making it into science fiction’s favorite greats, was intellectually superior and metaphorically rich. Gibson’s tiny patch of success, a green sward on a digital lawn, will live on in time for some select readers in a way that Hitler’s ideas will not. The Aryan Race and the hierarchy of European men is dust, but Gibson’s cyberspace deck is permanent and enduring. Both have success of a kind, it is up to you what to make of it.