278: Self-Doubt and Success: What J.M. Coetzee Teaches Us About Becoming

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us”
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee

Dear Friends

Success always seems so neat, coherent and, in its perfection, unobtainable. We look at Arundhati Roy’s global acclaim, not knowing of her early twenties spent in a one-room shack. We celebrate Pixar’s award-winning movies, forgetting that the only reason Steve Jobs didn’t sell them was that he couldn’t find a buyer.

We think of building a life as master planning; in reality, it is much more iterative, a kind of drip castle rising incrementally from the beach sand, or perhaps, more augustly, the never-ending adjustments made by the master painter.

This is why I love biography and memoir (and of course, good company histories); they remind us that success rarely arrives fully formed. And even the bravest of us question and doubt ourselves – even when we’ve created success.  

This week’s letter is different. My coaching encourages integration across multiple domains; life is too complex for one lens. So, in that spirit, today we adventure down a less-travelled path in the world of executive coaching and we go longer than we should. I hope you enjoy the journey.

Late last year, I was invited to a lecture at Stellenbosch University; J.M. Coetzee and Abdulrazak Gurnah, two of Africa’s Nobel Literature laureates, would be in conversation. I suggested to a friend that we should travel together. We allowed 90 minutes for the normally 50-minute journey. We arrived two and a half hours later, in time to catch the closing remarks.

I was disappointed. I’ve been lucky enough to hear Gurnah speak (at the brilliant Africa in the World festival), but not the notoriously reclusive Coetzee. We had half an hour or so, watching in amusement as the poor academic assigned the role of conversation facilitator battled to keep up with these two exacting, austere, and irascible giants. Still, I felt cheated. Even worse, cheated by myself. I should have left earlier.

Later that week, I was in Kalk Bay. I paused at the bookselling trader who, on unpredictable days, sets up his trestle tables – only one actually on the trestles, the other acting more as a serving platter; often, an excess expands onto the pavement and the brick borders of flower beds, transforming them, momentarily, into a type of display system. At first glance, it may seem disorganised, but only in the sense that a Jackson Pollock is splatter; the collection is neatly ordered, not by category, but by space, as if he had trained as an accrocheur, each book neatly placed, the totality speaking of a curious mind committed to exploring the world.

His curation is both eclectic and particular: Voltaire alongside Simon Sinek and Adam Grant; Booker Prize winners next to Noam Chomsky; Sobukwe, Sankara, Ali Smith, Chimamanda Adichie, Mikhail Bulgakov. And, on this day, Coetzee’s Youth. The middle of three books, loosely memoir, stretched into fiction or perhaps the other way around. Coetzee refuses, rightly I’d argue, to guide us to what is what; life and memory are always slippery, why pretend otherwise?

I handed him Youth. He asked, “Would you like Boyhood and Summertime?” Who wouldn’t? But I knew what he meant. I nodded, smiling; the universe compensating me for my loss.

He asked me to watch his books (and cashbox!) whilst he went to a hole-in-the wall storeroom. He returned carrying two book-packed cooldrink crates and, after a minute’s rummaging, looked up triumphant. Triptych in hand, I headed home.

They’re powerful books. We all doubt, and sometimes dislike, ourselves. Coetzee shows us that we can nevertheless stumble forward into living life. His books reveal the other dimension of building life – the archaeological and the imaginary.

Architecting builds; archaeology—the discovery of what is there, perhaps always there, as the Buddhists enjoin, Discover the face you had before you were born—enables us to know what we’re building with; imagination allows the possibility that, no matter how seemingly poor the materials we have at hand, much is possible.

Summertime, the last of the three, is laugh-out-loud funny. I would never have guessed.

Boyhood brings a stark view to his childhood, which some have dismissed as retrospective mythmaking: a Nobel laureate known for austere interrogation and reflection conjuring an unchildlike, austere, questioning child. But it resonated with me. I know it to be true for many lives: the sense early on, of being in contexts where we don’t quite fit or belong, wrestling equally with the anger that it is so and the doubt that it is so. “What do you know? Difficult child.” Confusion swirls: awareness and knowing that are preternaturally and precociously adult, undercut by a child’s unknowing uncertainty and desperate hope that they’re wrong.

Listen to that child. If they know they don’t belong, they’re probably going somewhere else. Help them get there.

Youth gives us doubt. A mathematics-trained Coetzee working as a programmer, convinced he is to be a poet, unsure that it will ever happen (almost unbelievably the future Booker and Nobel prize-winner worked for IBM).

“When he tries to imagine what sort of poetry would flow from doing the right thing time after time after time, he sees only blank emptiness. The right thing is boring. So he is at an impasse: he would rather be bad than boring, has no respect for a person who would rather be bad than boring, and has no respect either for the cleverness of being able to put his dilemma into words.”

His childhood uncertainty amplified in early adulthood.

“One question still nags at him and will not go away. Will the woman who unlocks the store of passion within him, if she exists, also release the blocked flow of poetry and thus prove himself worthy of her love? It would be nice if the first were true, but he suspects it is not. Just as he has fallen in love with Ingeborg Bachman in one way and with Anna Karina in another, so, he suspects, the intended one will have to know him by his works, to fall in love with his art before she will be so foolish as to fall in love with him.”

It is an unflinching reflection of the self-doubt that captures all of us from time to time.

“What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail. He wants an A or an alpha or one hundred per cent for his every attempt, and a big Excellent! in the margin. Ludicrous! Childish! He does not have to be told so: he can see it for himself. Nevertheless, he cannot do it. Not today. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow he will be in the mood, have the courage.”

He, of course, knows what he is doing and cannot escape it. Each of us has been trapped in that cycle, unable to escape, wanting someone to give us a report card that says we’re on track.

We might say Coetzee got lucky – he chose a world in which you could still get a prize. Most of us don’t have that. We have to navigate the complexity of our chosen path, mostly without the reassurance of the end-of-term report card.  And, of course, knowing that this is true, we can pause and write Excellent! in the margins of someone’s life.

Doubt can be corrosive. Our thoughts are always right, or so it seems. Bouncing around in our brain, there’s nothing to disprove them – whether grandiose and disparaging, our internal archaeology makes them rational.

“This is how the questioning always works. At first it may wander here and there; but in the end, unfailingly, it turns and gathers itself, and points a finger at himself. Always it is he who sets the train of thinking in motion; always it is thinking that slips out of his control and returns to accuse him.”

I’ll often suggest to clients, “Write it down” — externalising can give perspective.

If you’ve ever doubted yourself, and you have, read Youth. You’re in award-winning company.

Coetzee points us to the unromantic truth of success: “What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail again and again?”

In Youth he still dreams of being a poet. Summertime fast forwards us into a world in which he is a success.  Written from the perspective of a fictional biographer, it starts shortly after he has just published his first novel.
It’s a useful perspective to consider – what would our lives look like viewed in this way? Assume you’ve died and someone is to write about your life. What would they find? What would they say? Would you want it published and, if not, what are you going to do about it?

Coetzee has an affair with a married woman (or so the story says). His fictive biographer asks her, “Are you saying he was in love with you?”

She replies, “In love… In love with me or with the idea of me? I don’t know. What I do know is that he had reason to be thankful to me. I made things easy for him. There are men who find it hard to court a woman. They are afraid to expose their desire, to open themselves to rebuff. Behind their fear there often lies a childhood history. I never forced John to expose himself. I was the one who did the courting. I was the one who did the seducing. I was the one who managed the terms of the affair. I was even the one who decided when it was over. So you ask, Was he in love? and I reply, He was in gratitude”.

She tells the biographer, remembering of course this is all Coetzee’s weaving, that one night he arrived with a cassette, the Schubert string quintet, “… he wanted to make love, and specifically – excuse the explicitness – wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement”.

Later she reflects:
“When a man and a woman are in love they create their own music, it comes instinctively, they don’t need lessons. But what does our friend John do? He drags a third presence into the bedroom. Franz Schubert becomes number one, the master of love; John become number two, the master’s disciple and executant; and I become number three, the instrument on whom the sex-music is going to be played. That – it seems to me – tells you all you need to know about John Coetzee. The man who mistook his mistress for a violin… A man who loved by numbers. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry!”

I was torn between astonishment at the absurdity of it all, sadness at the pain, and regard for someone who was prepared to write about their failings without blinking.

Coetzee shows us a way – that even when exhausted by doubting rumination, even when deeply flawed, as we all are, that we can act in the direction of our hopes and with persistence uncover our lives. It may not be your way. It is a way. Life is as much archaeology as it is action.

If you know a leader who’s building without a report card right now, please forward this to them. The archive from the last 6 years is here. 

All the best

Karl

PS: There’s a kind of conversation leaders rarely get to have inside the pressure of delivery —one where judgement is formed, not performed. I facilitate leadership colloquiums for executive teams that create that space: rigorous, generative conversations that build shared judgement. If your team is hungry for disciplined conversation, deeper reading, and the kind of thinking that changes how decisions get made, contact me and click here to learn more.