Thoughts on Luck and Cultural Readiness

This essay is a continuation of two older writings of mine: “How Many Other Colin Kaepernick’s Are There” and “Is Accounting 10% Inspiration, and 90% Perspiration.”

The Rupture Between the Artist and His Pen

James Bennet and Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke in front of an audience at Sixth & I Synagogue. After the interview, they accepted questions from the audience. A Howard University student asked Coates the following:

“When I was reading your book [Between the World and Me] for the first time, I felt a kind of kinship almost as if I was seeing myself become a young black man again, but also in a way that I’m also learning how to remain alive as a young black man. But now, in hearing you talking about the ways in which you’ve experienced yourself after publishing the book, I wonder how you deal with the rupture between yourself and the pen and those words once they’ve left your hand.”

Coates had to admit that he had not yet figured that out. “when you’re actually sitting there, doing the thing [writing],” he says, “. . .you’re preparing yourself for failure. You have to be okay with giving all of your energy to it and no one hearing it. And the opposite happened. That’s a great problem, but it’s still a problem. Just like you have to prepare for failure, you have to prepare for success too. And I was not particularly prepared for success.”

In Coates’ industry, preparation for success or failure is tied to producing…