…no success comes by magic.
…no success comes by magic.

…no success comes by magic.

There’s a scene in Pride and Pre­ju­dice where Eliza­beth is play­ing the piano­forte in Lady Cath­er­ine de Bourgh’s draw­ing room at Ros­ings. Mr. Darcy says he isn’t good at mak­ing small talk, and Liz­zie says that she knows she could prob­ably play the piano­forte bet­ter than she does, if only she prac­ticed more. She owns the fact that she is not play­ing to her full poten­tial. She does not tell us how much she envies some oth­er young lady who is more accom­plished on the instrument.

This is summed up well in a meme I saw on Twit­ter the oth­er day. It was a quote from Tim Fargo: Don’t envy what people have, emu­late what they did to have it.

I love this quote. It rang true for me because it is some­thing that I finally began to learn in recent years. I picked up some bad habits in my youth, you know, being crit­ic­al of oth­ers as they cel­eb­rate a suc­cess in their life, envy­ing them because it was­n’t me… focus­sing on the wrong things, rather than find­ing joy in their suc­cess. But then I elim­in­ated some neg­at­ive influ­ences from my life, and turned that around. It makes me a hap­pi­er person.

Much as I’m a fantasy fan… no suc­cess comes by magic.