Famous people have never really interested me.

It’s not their fault really, most of them never really wanted to be interesting in the first place. They just wanted to be famous. If Tiger Woods or Brangelina or whoever else we’ve shoved onto the public stage this week could avoid tabloid rags taking pictures of their latest pimple, 7 out of 10 days they would. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Famous people have never really interested me.

The very act of becoming a celebrity has a way of dulling the senses that bought you that celebrity in the first place. When you are surrounded by your own hype all day every day, you start to lose track of the hard work, late nights, and ego-shattering rejection that formed the early part of your career. This dulling process is the same whether you act, sing or sling Social Media advice for a living.

Famous people have never really interested me.

Why? Because famous people aren’t hungry anymore, their fame has seen to that, and the only really good stories in the world come from people who are hungry.

Think about your favorite writers, your favorite directors, your favorite business heroes — more often than not their best work happened near the beginning of the careers. It was the thing they did that tipped them into the public spotlight that defines them. It was the thing they created when they were hungry, tired and reeling from the fear they might never make it that forced their hands to create something amazing.

It was the fact that they had nothing to lose and no where else to go that gave them the confidence to do something great.

Don’t get me wrong, many people build upon their early successes and go on to make masterpiece after masterpiece. Unfortunately, these people are the exception not the rule. It’s hard to live up to your own good press, and the public makes it easy for someone who was once successful to live off of that success forever.

The only way to escape this trap is to realize that unless your life goal is to be famous, the only way you are going to survive as a creator is to stay hungry. You need to see what you do, you’re successes and your failures, as a part of a journey. You need to keep your fame, whether it’s appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair or getting to speak in front of your local Chamber of Commerce in perspective.

You need to understand that a part of why you started creating in the first place was because you were bored of not being challenged, and understanding all of this you need to spend your cycles searching for new boundaries to push, new challenges to overcome and new ways to sate your hunger.

Or you can just follow in the footsteps of the brilliant writer and poet Dorothy Parker and realize just how silly your “fame” really is,

“I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.”