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It would be super easy for me, more than anyone, to point at my modest but improbable success and say, "See! It was all meant to be!" But as far as I can tell, success is heavily based on luck -- it's just that long hours earn you more chances to get lucky. The more stuff you do, the more people you meet and impress, the more chances for opportunity to come your way. So it's true that I lucked out when the coffee table book featuring full-color photos of my penis wearing a series of humorous hats was adapted into film, but when that happened, I was also working two different jobs in two different industries and updating two different websites on the side. Combined this took up about 90 hours a week of my time, and I had been grinding away like that for 10 years (I graduated in 1997 and didn't start doing what I'm doing now until 2007). So if that hadn't happened, I like to think that something else would have. I'll never know.

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Probably something in modeling.

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But for me to act like it was "meant" to happen would also be implying that all of the people slowly starving to death in North Korean prison camps are part of God's plan. "You just need to find what you were destined to do! Now, the bad news is that you were destined to die of carbon monoxide poisoning at age 43 because your house had a defective furnace valve ..."

And no, my grand message here isn't that life is random and meaningless, although that would make things way easier if it were true (as long as a single person exists on Earth who needs something you're capable of providing, your life will have meaning). But there's no magic formula for making it happen. You just keep grinding, and eventually something will come along. Or not. Who the fuck knows? Here's a favorite song of mine that sums up my feelings pretty well:

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What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror, the third book in David Wong's John Dies at the End series, is available now!