Fame Fatale

I'm a novelist who's suddenly getting successful (after 20 years of crappy jobs and rejected manuscripts). Every day, several people make this annoying and rather insulting comment to me: "Don't forget about me when you're famous!" This got me wondering: What keeps some people grounded while others let success go to their head?

--Published

Of course you'll stay in touch with your old friends. You'll have your assistant call them to see whether they'd like to come over and clean out your rain gutters. The quality that keeps success from turning you into, well, Kanye East is humility. People confuse humility -- being humble -- with being humiliated. However, humility is basically a healthy awareness of your limitations -- what social psychologist and humility researcher Pelin Kesebir describes as "a down-to-earth perspective of yourself in relation to all other beings." That's something you're more likely to have when you make it at 40 -- after 20 years of working crappy jobs, driving a car held together with duct tape and hope, and selling your blood to buy a tuna melt. Contrast that with hitting it big at 17: "Bro, I was just on my hoverboard at the mall, and some dude handed me a recording contract!" The cool thing is, social psychologist Elliott Kruse and his colleagues find that you can bolster humility by expressing gratitude -- appreciation for how another person has helped you. Expressing gratitude both "inhibits internal focus" and "promotes external focus" -- focus on others. This sort of wider view may help you keep any fame you get in perspective. After all, there's a way to live on in the hearts and minds of many, even after you die, and it's by creating brilliant, spirit-moving art -- or by being a chinchilla videotaped while eating a Dorito.