"It wasn't success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together - within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people's goal"
About this Quote
Penn Jillette takes a word that usually arrives wearing a tux - "success" - and strips it down to a day job that doesn’t make you miserable. The move is slyly anti-glamour: he rejects the cultural scoreboard of fame, money, and prestige in favor of a metric so plain it almost sounds like settling. Almost. Underneath the understatement is a quiet flex: if you define the finish line yourself, you can actually cross it.
The context matters. Jillette is speaking as one half of Penn & Teller, a duo often framed as icons of big, audacious Las Vegas success. By pointing back to the early days ("within a year") and naming the scrappy-sounding "Asparagus Valley", he punctures the myth that creative careers only become legitimate after some long grind validated by outsiders. He’s also doing a magician’s misdirection: you expect a story about making it, and he gives you a story about opting out.
The subtext is a critique of aspiration culture. Most people’s goals, he notes, are modest: pay the rent while doing something that feels like yours. The line "Which is many people's goal" lands like a shrug, but it’s doing work. It democratizes ambition while exposing how rarely society makes that ambition attainable. Jillette isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s arguing that freedom - the ability to choose your work and be sustained by it - is the real trick, and the rarest.
The context matters. Jillette is speaking as one half of Penn & Teller, a duo often framed as icons of big, audacious Las Vegas success. By pointing back to the early days ("within a year") and naming the scrappy-sounding "Asparagus Valley", he punctures the myth that creative careers only become legitimate after some long grind validated by outsiders. He’s also doing a magician’s misdirection: you expect a story about making it, and he gives you a story about opting out.
The subtext is a critique of aspiration culture. Most people’s goals, he notes, are modest: pay the rent while doing something that feels like yours. The line "Which is many people's goal" lands like a shrug, but it’s doing work. It democratizes ambition while exposing how rarely society makes that ambition attainable. Jillette isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s arguing that freedom - the ability to choose your work and be sustained by it - is the real trick, and the rarest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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