Success Quote by Alma Gluck

Gluck’s line cuts against the modern tyranny of metrics: auditions, juries, résumés, the constant demand to turn practice into proof. Coming from a musician - and a singer, no less, in an era when women’s careers were policed by respectability and gatekeepers - it reads like both credo and self-defense. She’s not romanticizing aimlessness; she’s rescuing study from being reduced to a transaction.

“The goal is a mere accident” is deliberately provocative because it demotes the trophy without denying the work. In music, you can do everything “right” and still have an off night, a cracked note, a changed conductor, a fickle audience. Success arrives through a swarm of contingencies: timing, taste, health, patrons, geography. Calling the goal an accident is Gluck’s way of telling students to stop bargaining with the future and start committing to the present tense: breath, phrasing, ear, discipline.

The subtext is almost Zen, but with a performer’s grit. Study becomes a daily ethics rather than a ladder. If the goal is accidental, you can’t control it; you can only become the kind of artist for whom accidents tend to happen. It also reframes failure. Miss the prize, lose the role, get reviewed badly - the work still counts, because its real object was never the external badge.

In a culture that treats “grind” as a currency to be cashed out, Gluck offers a corrective: practice is not a down payment on applause. It’s the place where the self gets built, quietly, before anyone claps.