David McElroy

Josh was already sitting at a table when I came into the restaurant late Saturday afternoon. He had finished eating and was drinking a beer as he watched a basketball game.

I wanted to watch the same game, so I ended up at the table next to him. We chatted off and on about the game as it went along. He was friendly and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. At halftime, though, something came up about marriage — and he mentioned that he just left his wife today. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

I cautiously responded that he didn’t seem to be very upset about it.

“Yeah, it’s not really a big deal,” he said. “We’ve been married for four years and it turns out she can’t have a baby. Just found out for sure this week. I want to have kids to carry on the family name, so I told her I have to cut it off with her and find another wife. I hate it, because I loved her.”

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The instructor was leading the class through exercises designed to produce a set of individual goals and plans. It was Thursday morning and I was attending mandatory post-license training for new real estate agents in Birmingham.

“What do you want?” she said again. “Write it in a specific way. Do you want to be rookie of the year? Imagine yourself accepting that award. Do you want to hit a certain financial goal? Be specific.”

I started typing. I named a couple of goals. They seemed to be the sorts of things other people around me were excited about.

And then it hit me. I didn’t want the things I had just written down. I was in a group of about 20 people, most of whom seemed to want those things, so it was easy to fall into accepting their goals as obvious and right.

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When I was a kid, Rodney Dangerfield was a big name in comedy, but I could never figure out why. He simply wasn’t funny to me, but most people laughed with him anyway.

The world is full of people with talent who never achieve much success, but Dangerfield was just the opposite. He was the man with no real talent — but who managed to become wealthy and famous simply because he refused to quit trying.

I’d never thought much about Dangerfield’s success, but I read an article this morning that has me thinking about how artistic and commercial success happens. It’s a recent piece from the New York Times Magazine about how a “nobody” named Jacob Cohen turned himself into the world-famous comic named Rodney Dangerfield — the man who could “get no respect.”

When he started in comedy, Cohen used the name Jack Roy. (He even legally changed his name to Jack Roy and that remained his legal name for life.) He was a singing waiter at one point, but he was fired. When he did get on stage as a comic, almost nobody thought he was funny. He couldn’t get booked. He was a failure.

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