Extract from Chapter 9: The secret of success

In the introduction to this book I did promise you that, towards the end, I would explain the secret of success. What’s more, I declared, I would give you an explanation which was couched in mathematical terms.

No doubt you have been thinking, every now and then, that it was time I delivered on my promise. So here is my explanation.

First of all, if we are going to talk about success, we need to define the term; after a fashion. But rather than lay down my own definition, in absolute terms, I am going to suggest that you formulate your own.

I explained in Chapter 1 that there are several different benefits which can be derived from writing – the chief ones being money, fame, and literary reputation – and that different individuals will wish to achieve different combinations of these. So, feel free to do your own pick and mix for defining the term success. This won’t matter a bit, because the mathematical formulae, or expressions, that I shall be giving you, will hold good whatever particular definition of success you have chosen.

You will doubtless be familiar with the use of the equals sign, as in 2 + 2 = 4. But you may not, perhaps, be familiar with another mathematical symbol, written in the form of two colons, as in X :: Y. When used like that, the :: sign means ‘varies as to’. The :: symbol was introduced by William Oughtred in a book published in 1631.

How might we use this symbol in relation to writing and publishing? Well, we might say that the thickness of a book varies as to the number of pages; which means that the more pages there are, the thicker the book is. We could also express this statement as T :: N, where T stands for thickness and N is the number of pages.
  
Now let us turn our attention to success inasmuch as it concerns writers, and try to determine the factors which create success. In other words, we need to find the missing part of the expression S :: ?


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