What does success actually cost? When you make your passion your life, there’s no guaranteed roadmap to recognition. For the CULT100, our annual list of cultural bellwethers, struggles along the way have ranged from the minor (paper cuts, forgetting people’s names) to the seemingly insurmountable (exploitative industries, strained relationships).
As part of the list, we asked 35 figures at the tops of their fields, from theater to tech, what the hardest part has been so far. Some responses are funny, like legendary radio journalist Terry Gross‘s urine-in-her-coffee debacle. Others are relatable—just look at actor and musician Diana Silvers learning to reject and be rejected with grace, or romance scribe Rachel Reid working up the nerve to put herself in the spotlight. And some answers are sobering reminders of how structural and social issues are intrinsically tied to the creative economy, as countless interviewees described the shortage of sustainable funding as a hindrance.
And yet, the difference between the figures on this list and those that didn’t make the cut? These individuals below kept barreling ahead, through frustrations and systems and screw-ups. We’re all the better for it.
What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?
“Finding a work-life balance. But I’m learning to accept that it’s not about the perfect percentage. I may never even find the perfect balance at all. I’m learning that maybe it’s just about the act of finding. The search. The journey. Just trying to enjoy the bumpy ride to equilibrium.” —Lee Sung Jin, showrunner
“Remembering people’s names. My brain is offloading them at an alarming rate. And I’ve met too many people. It’s given me a social phobia.” —Judd Apatow, filmmaker
“Paper cuts.” —Justin McDaniel, professor
“Reading negative things about myself.” —Jake Shane, comedian
“For almost a decade, I have been trying and failing to find some holy grail of writing—a form halfway between nonfiction and novel, allowing me the former’s rigor and the latter’s invention. I can’t explain it better than this, which is probably why I never found it. I started so many different books and dropped them for no specific reason other than a dim awareness that they didn’t sound right. This eventually led me to writing Perfection, so in retrospect, I can cast it as a fruitful pursuit of sorts. But retrospect is easy.” —Vincenzo Latronico, author
“As for every artist maybe, to keep on going, to keep the faith when nothing is working yet.” —Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel of (LA)HORDE, dance collective
“The hardest thing about my career is that ‘Is this working?’ and ‘This is working,’ look exactly the same about 80 percent of the time.” —Sunny Lee, chef
“Dating male actors. Be depressed or be a narcissist, but please, for the love of god, don’t be both!” —Mary Beth Barone, comedian
“Every minute I’m writing alone, which is most of the time.” —BJ Novak, actor and filmmaker
“Funding my events. It’s very important for me to keep La Watch Party free for all. It’s hard. But we make it work.” —Lyas, fashion content creator
“On October 28, 2023, our four-story house in Gaza was bombed and completely leveled. Fortunately, my family and I were staying with relatives in a refugee camp at the time, so we survived. Three weeks later, I was abducted by Israeli forces and subjected to brutal treatment: handcuffed, blindfolded, sexually abused, beaten, and forced to remain on my knees for the entire 52 hours of my abduction. It’s a miracle that I survived, something I do not take for granted. I cannot stop writing.” —Mosab Abu Toha, poet
“Zooms have been both a blessing of convenience and sometimes the bane of my existence. They might be my greatest enemy.” —Natalia Dyer, actor
“Dealing with people who tell me they never think about fashion. I ask them if they dress themselves in the morning.” —Vanessa Friedman, fashion journalist
“It’s hard every day. It’s really a rollercoaster of emotions, swinging from hubris to defeat within the course of an hour. It’s so fickle being this sensitive. Sometimes I feel my veil is too thin. The beauty of having these creative portals can also just make your life really difficult to bear. I wish I could turn off my spiritual goggles a little more often. Artists have these great wounds where the light shines in, but there is also so much darkness and doubt. But it’s hard for everyone. Being human is hard. I don’t know why I think it would get easier?” —Lykke Li, musician
“The uncertainty, the worry, the risks. It has taken absolutely everything out of me to be doing this. I frankly don’t think I have the right temperament for it, but alas here we are, by the grace of G-d.” —Robby Hoffman, actor
“Filmmaking and art are resource-heavy, and when you look around, there’s a certain class that’s more represented than others, especially under capitalism and the history of this country. As a first-generation kid who grew up in public housing, I’ve spent a lot of my life building not just a financial base for myself but for my parents, too. I’m the first everything, you know? There was no safety net. A lot of sacrifices came with that. But I’m also grateful for it. It guided me toward resourcefulness, self-reliance, and a non-traditional entry into a creative practice that I believe is more sustainable, even if it took longer to develop. I feel like I’m just now stepping into making the work I would have made all along if financial survival hadn’t been the most constant thing occupying my mind for 30-plus years.” —Mohammad Gorjestani, filmmaker
“For me, it’s uprooting everything and leaving for months at a time. But I also love that part.” —Thomas Doherty, actor
“Caring too much. Feeling the losses of not getting a job I want or not being seen the way I think I should. Having to convince people that I’m worth money. Giving a shit and then not caring enough to actually give a shit.” —Alia Shawkat, actor
“Lucking into it.” —Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review of Books Classics
“Failing, day after day, to combine formal rigor with depth of feeling.” —Hernan Diaz, author
“Fundraising!” —Carol Bove, artist
“Um, probably racism?” —Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, playwright
“I have a really hard time hiding my disgust at the bad morals and dehumanizing, exploitative power structures that undergird the whole Hollywood apparatus.” —Jane Schoenbrun, filmmaker
“While this career has been incredibly joyous and gratifying, nothing that is good comes easy. My whole career has been a series of failures and hardships that have led me to learn and improve to find success.” —Paul Carmichael, chef
“The hardest part was finding the courage to submit my first manuscript to publishers. I had to get over my fear of other people reading fiction I’d written. It’s terrifyingly vulnerable to create fictional characters and to ask people to love them. To ask people to spend time with them and think about them. I mean, the ego you have to have to expect anyone to do that! I still don’t know how I got past that first hurdle.” —Rachel Reid, author
“Focusing on the work instead of the noise.” —Sam Levinson, show runner
“Unlearning the pressure to be easily defined. I’ve realized my lived experience is a mold I get to create for myself. The gray area is where nuance—and real culture—lives.” —Sonya Yu, arts patron
“Deciding to get a PhD instead of spending those years on the road playing music.” —Paul Grimstad, actor, author, and professor
“Learning to draw/perspective angles. It’s so much harder than you think, even when using a ruler.” —Fred Armisen, comedian
“The strain on my relationships. I hate missing birthdays and graduations and reunions. I’m so grateful for what I spend my time on, but I never want to live so many other lives that I miss out on my own.” —Havana Rose Liu, actor
“Staying true to yourself and not giving in to foodie clique/media pressure. I blazed my own trail. Never kissed ass or begged for favors.” —Scarr Pimentel, chef
“Getting used to the chaos of having no routine in a way. Always hard oscillating between tour life and home life.” —Jackson Walker, musician
“There was a point in my career where I thought of leaving Fresh Air before Danny Miller, our longtime executive producer who just retired, came along. The facility back then was really run down. There was a day when urine from the upstairs bathroom leaked into my coffee cup and I just thought, I’ve got to get out of here. I was doing a three-hour show, five days a week, by myself.” —Terry Gross, journalist
“Saying and receiving ‘no.’ Sometimes—a lot of the time— you really, really want something and you don’t get it. And sometimes, you really, really want something and you do get it but you can’t do it. It’s hard to know if you’re making the right decisions. A friend recently told me, ‘Rejection is protection.'” —Diana Silvers, actor
“Maybe the early days, when it was looking as if I wasn’t going to have a career. But even that was kind of great, because it made me confront the question, Why are you doing this, anyway? It was also thrilling (as a husband and father of, at that time, two small kids) to see that life, just life, was going to be plenty, even if the ‘career’ part didn’t work out.” —George Saunders, author
“Learning to protect my time.” —Frida Escobedo, architect
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