I think a strong suspicion of success can be healthy, right?
I mean, unless you are sitting on enough money to never work again, should you so choose, “success” in any shape or form feels completely ephemeral.
My point is that you can not (should not) put your value in something fleeting.
Like fireflies on a summer night in the Texas Hill Country, even if it lasts another 20 years, it will be gone too soon.
I was still cooking every day and night. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list, but a healthy distrust, a strong suspicion that I’d better keep my day job, was still very much the order of the day. This couldn’t last, I thought. It was surely a fluke. A flash in the pan. What possible appeal could my story—something I’d written with no larger audience than New York-area line cooks, waiters, and bartenders in mind—have beyond the tristate area? And if twenty-eight years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at all, it was that if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.
-Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw