What a week it’s been with stories of “underdogs” succeeding.
“Too risky” is what most backers, advisers and producers said to Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant novel Tinkers; to the producers of “Next To Normal,” the riveting Broadway play about mental illness that also won a Pulitzer this year for Drama, to Lissa Boles, who moved from marketing executive to founder of The Soul Map, a unique consulting service that helping people create purposeful life plans based on astrology.
Then I finally meet Mike Strozier, founder of World Audience Publishers, an independent publishing company for and by artists, that is small but growing fast. Even though people are saying publishing is over, Mike is succeeding because he loves art, loves writers, and is a gentle, generous soul with a quiet but intense passion.
Mainstream publishers turned down my book “Be the Noodle” because it was, you got it, too risky. “It should be a memoir or a how-to book,” the fraidy cats told my agent Neil Salkind, “a love story or an adventure guide. But not all of those things.” Yet Neil found Mike, and now the book is finding an audience and touching people in a way that just fills me with joy and gratitude.
Passion can trump risk. The trick, I’ve found, is to persevere when in your heart of hearts you know you’ve done some good work that can serve others.
In the Sunday New York Times story, “Mr. Cinderella: From Rejection Notes to the Pulitzer,” Paul Harding’s friend and former teacher Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, said, “One of the problems I have is making my students believe that they can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don’t have to calculate the market.” Ah, wise woman advice.
Though we’re taught in business school to calculate the market opportunity and then fill a need, perhaps that advice stunts too many innovators, artists, passionate entrepreneurs.
As Robinson advises, maybe we should satisfy our own definition of good.