Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Considering that he was born in a very rural part of Nigeria, it’s quite amazing that he has become a hugely prolific author of world renown writing books, plays, and poems at a furious pace. Somewhere in there he managed to get a doctorate at the University of Leeds, be a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and, spend several years in jail in Nigeria as a political prisoner. For the last few decades he has been a professor at several different universities in Nigeria.
Quite a story for someone born in 1934 in the then even more wild area of rural Nigeria.
When it was my good fortune, quite randomly, to hear him discuss his life it made quite an impression on me. The hardships he endured on his way to great success and the persistence he exhibited in pushing forward on his own path to greatness are inspirational. And then he said the thing that sums up how he has achieved his success, that which differentiates those who find success and those who don’t.
Soyinka was asked a question about what kept him going when he was younger and found rejection everywhere, what advice he could offer young authors struggling to keep going. There was a long pause, a bit of a chuckle, a humble “I really have no great advice”, and then, in his soft voice, these words of great wisdom, “have a drawer in your desk and just throw all the rejection slips in it and keep going.”