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.
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.
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.
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.