In October 1853, an express mail wagon pulled up to the Thoreau family home in Concord, Massachusetts.
Inside the wagon were 709 copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, waiting to be carried up two flights of stairs to Henry David Thoreau’s room in the family attic.
These were the copies of the book that no one had bought.
Thoreau had published A Week more than four years earlier, at his own expense and with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s encouragement.
Of the 1,000 copies printed, 75 had been given away, and a little more than 200 had sold. Now the remaining 709 were in Thoreau’s possession, something he documented with deadpan amusement.
“I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself,” Thoreau famously quipped in his October 28 journal entry of that year.
The line is known for its humor, but the next passage, I’d argue, reveals even more about the writer.
“Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.”
The lackluster sales of the book, which took years for Thoreau to write and revise, were impossible to ignore. A Week was considered a commercial failure.
But even with a mountain of unsold books in his room, Thoreau still took up the pen.
By now, he had little reason to expect any sort of mainstream literary success. A Week was, to that point, a flop, and the publication of Walden was still nearly a year away. Despite years of toiling at his work, Thoreau seemed hardly destined for a recognized literary career.
But he also understood that the reception of his work and the work itself were two very different things.
“Indeed, I believe that this result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares,” Thoreau wrote. “It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer.”
He knew that what appeared to be the commercial success or failure of his work was largely out of his hands, but the work itself was something he could control regardless of the outcome.
In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson made a similar point. “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best,” he wrote.
What follows from there is beyond our control in so many ways.
It’s easy to say, intellectually, that outcomes don’t matter, but of course, they do. We want the things we make to succeed. We want our projects to work, our efforts to be noticed, our writing to be read. We want some evidence that the time we spent on things was worthwhile or meaningful.
But it’s worth remembering how little control we really have over outcomes. In many cases, we have none at all.
The work, on the other hand—the process—is always there, always available.
We can decide to pick up the pen, the paintbrush, the walking shoes, the hiking backpack, the daily practice, the awareness to what matters most to us. We can decide to make things and pay attention, and to rely not on external signals of success, but on how we relate to the processes we enjoy.
Had Thoreau been more inclined to listen solely to the market, he might have given up literary writing altogether and leaned more into surveying landscapes—something he was also very good at.
Had he focused on the outcome instead of the process, the mound of books in his room would’ve told him to quit.
Years later, Emerson's essay "Success" would make the distinction another way. Success, he wrote, “by no means consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and satisfy spectators.”
“It is enough if you work in the right direction,” he suggested.
Those are two very different ways of measuring a life’s work.
There is the showy feat: the thing that gets noticed, praised, elevated.
And there is the right direction.
One is mostly external, and the other is mostly decided from within.
Which one you prioritize can change how you think about your work. And one of them is far more within your control than the other.
By November 1853, Thoreau had finally paid off the debt from publishing A Week. The hundreds of unsold copies remained in the attic, continuing to occupy a sizable space of his living quarters.
He could see them every day, but he still took up his pen.
Consider: Where in your life are you measuring success based on an outcome you can't control rather than the work itself? What are you doing that would still feel worth continuing, even if the outcome looked like failure from a conventional perspective of success?
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