Socrates, Plato, Vincent van Gogh, Mathew Brady, Franz Schubert, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Sammy Davis, Jr., Johannes Vermeer, Karl Marx, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka and Stieg Larsson.
The thing common to all the above mentioned names is they were all geniuses. Thinkers and doers of a different kind. They weren't bonded by that limitation called society and hence could break the threshold of human acceptance. But they also had their own insecurities. Some domestic, some existential. Socrates' wife was fed up of him. Gogh went on to chop off his ear. Schubert was deemed mad by his peers. Keats died a virgin and of tuberculosis. Poe's life resembled his writings—macabre. Thoreau failed to break the jinx. Plath ended up with her face inside an oven. Wilde didn't want to end up with a bad sense of humour. Marx couldn't even complete the only book he's known for today: Das Capital. Fitzgerald passed away not giving a damn about The Great Gatsby because nobody else seemed to anyway. Kafka played a huge price for his maverick leaning. Larrson never imagined that David Fincher would be interested in his work someday.
In other words, all these personalities died assuming that they were closer to failure than success. And our curse is we are living assuming that we are closer to success than failure.
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