The site I launched last February expanded to its first ten thousand users in a month. My friend and I put no work into it after launching it, because we didn't think it was interesting, but I'm able to raise attention to things pretty quickly. (Even without putting in effort, some money was made—we opened up a shitty Cafepress account and put a link on, and sold a handful of shirts and mousepads.)

This month, as an experiment, I started a blog without any publicizing, to see how well I could grow something without any promotion. Three weeks in I have over a hundred readers and am currently growing at the rate of seven or eight readers a day. Now I'm experimenting with a collective, because I want to see how well I can divert those readers towards other people if I care to.

I know it's out of fashion to say this, but I believe in the long tail. I'm able to publish anything I can imagine without consulting other people first, and if I can find a thousand people to buy whatever it is I'm making, then perhaps I'm not yet rich, but I'm financially free to do what I like. I've still got three years, and I'm utterly confident of finding an audience.

I think you'll find that as you continue on in your area, the competition grows significantly.

I'm curious. Competition with who? I don't know anybody who writes the way I do, or makes things look the way I do, or plays music how I do, or takes photos the way I do. Art's a great field in that there's no competition unless you go the route of searching for grants and entering contests, and I dislike both. I'd never live a lifestyle that relied on the good will of a panel of judges—though if it comes down to it, I can compete.

Competition for people's attention. No one does anything quite like you, but there are plenty of other writers, photographers or musicians for your audience to pay attention to.

If you're able to make a comfortable living doing what you like, then that's fantastic. (No sarcasm or irony intended.) But the assumption I had was we were talking about success at the top levels of a field, be it art, science or business. Any time you have multiple people doing similar things, competition develops.

I'm a Ph.D. student, and the ideal is we do interesting things and tell interested people about what we did. The reality is that the conferences we submit to can only accept a finite number of papers. Hence, there is a competition. Similar rules apply to things as basic as getting funding and getting a job.

But that's a competition with a few hundred thousand judges. It's easy to nab eyeballs when there are so many.

As for "top levels", I don't know how to determine that. I hold Vimeo in higher regard than I do Youtube, for instance, even if Vimeo is much smaller. I'd rather work on CollegeHumor than on Saturday Night Live, since they do better work, though I'd much rather start my own group and make something even better. The musicians that I like are frequently obscure or weird or simply unpopular; I'd say that I'm more impressed with Frank Zappa as an artist than I am with Paul McCartney (the Beatles aside), but McCartney's certainly the more famous of the two. My favorite handful of musicians/directors/authors aren't big names, even within any niche. I still think they're the best people I've found, though. So even if I'm not famous for what I do, as long as I'm doing the best work I consider myself the victor.

I'm past the point where I believe success has "levels". If you're not satisfied with what you're doing, you haven't succeeded. Once you are, then you're just as much a success as anybody.

I meant "top levels" as best in class, using whatever metric you want to apply. This is by no means has to be financial success or fame.

To bring us back to the original point, I would be shocked if the artists that you consider best in class did not work hard.

Working hard is one thing. Everybody's working hard by some metric. When I got curious last year and looked at how much I write on sites like this, the result was staggering. So theoretically I'm a hard worker.

I guess it depends what you mean by working hard. Pretty much all the artists I consider best in class put themselves in positions where they could work on whatever they wanted without distraction. I don't consider that working.

I do. "Hard work" doesn't have to be unpleasant. Personally, I take great satisfaction in doing it.

Can't you two see that you are talking at total cross-purposes?

You are talking about success by other people's measures: getting your paper accepted, being rated as "top" by other people, best in class this, accepted that.

He is not talking about those things at all.

You are never going to see eye to eye if you can't both A) see you are talking about entirely different things, and B) meet somewhere in the middle.