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Essay • 6 min read

How Not to Be a Victim of Success

Maria Popova explores how success can ossify our personal narrative, using Rockwell Kent's encounter with a statue from his past as a metaphor for resisting the trap of becoming our own myth.

📰 The Marginalian
📅 October 9, 2025
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and contradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossify the story of a person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure — both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world's estimation.

Maria Popova explores how success can trap us in our own narratives, using artist Rockwell Kent’s poignant encounter with a statue from his past as a powerful metaphor for maintaining authenticity despite external recognition.

At the heart of the piece is the idea that a self is a personal mythos—a story we construct to make sense of lived experience. But when the world affirms that story through success, it risks becoming rigid, turning us into victims of our own mythology.

Kent’s story serves as a warning: the challenge isn’t just learning to live with failure, but learning to live with success without letting it petrify who we are. Both require courage and constant resistance to measuring our souls by the world’s estimation.

Read the original on The Marginalian →