MAYBE SUCCESS
ISN’T MEASURED IN
ACHIEVEMENTS OR
“BEING HAPPY WITH
WHO YOU ARE.”Some 17 years ago, Ryan and I were
sportswriters at “competing” small
newspapers in Virginia’s Shenandoah
Valley. We had about a half dozen
high schools, a Division III university,
and a summer baseball league in our
coverage area. In that lava-hot turf
war, we somehow became friends.
We’ve kept in touch, but it’d been
a few months since we’d talked when
this curiously timed e-mail arrived.
He said he was preparing a speech
for the next week. He’s now a proj-
ect manager for a research firm near
Washington, and the speech he was
going to give was titled “How Do You
Define Success?” I’ve contributed to
a publication called Success, so he
turned the question to me: “How do
you define success?” I thought of my
coffee conversation and typed this:Hey, man,
Good to hear from you again. And
good timing. Your e-mail came in
just as I was chatting with another
friend, who’s going through one of
those rough spells at work. I wish I
had better advice.
What a broad question!
You know, after I left the Shenan-
doah Valley, my next job was in
Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I
made $22,500 a year—and this was
2005, not a generation ago. The two
other sportswriters on staff, Travis
and Jeff, were in their mid-20s too.
Honestly, we’d come to Rocky
Mount to leave Rocky Mount. Wespent our time talking about what
life must be like at a “real” news-
paper. We griped about our shop
and drooled over the Charlotte
Observer and the Raleigh News &
Observer. What resources they had!
Writers who covered only one team
and didn’t have to lay out pages or
proofread box scores. Talk about liv-
ing the dream. If we could just get to
one of those places! Then we could
go somewhere else!
Travis, Jeff, and I bonded over our
desire to part ways. We ate dinner to-
gether, went out to cover our games,
and came back to help send the final
pages to the printer by our 1:30 a.m.
deadline. On the best nights, we’d
grab the news editors and copy edi-
tors and play Wiffle ball in the park-
ing lot until 4 a.m., laughing and
joking until almost sunrise.112 april 2019
Reader’s Digest