Frogs in a Pot of Success: Why Something Is Always Happening, Even When Nothing Is Happening | By Steven W. Alloway

“Don’t chase your dreams. Human beings are persistent hunters. Follow behind your dreams at a slow, steady pace, until they get tired and lie down.” This meme, which I’ve seen circulating occasionally on social media, is obviously just meant to be a joke, but still, it makes me wonder: Is there anything to it?

The late, great Mitch Hedberg had another interesting take on the subject: “You know what, man? I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with them later.”

Chasing your dreams can be frustrating—especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time. No matter how far you go, it still seems like the goal is way off in the distance. You work hard, you put your all into it, and it feels like nothing comes of it. All of that effort wasted. Why do we keep at it? Is it worth it? Or should we just throw in the towel?

Playing to an Empty House

I think about this sometimes with regard to my theater group, Spirit OnStage. We’ve done at least two shows a year, sometimes more, every year for well over two decades. And yet, when I tell friends, “I’m doing a show with my theater group,” their response quite often is still, “You have your own theater group?”

We talk about the group and what we’re doing. We promote our shows. We invite friends, we invite the community. And we’re still not on anybody’s radar. As such, we’ve been known to perform to nearly empty houses—and in some cases, completely empty ones.

We pour our heart and soul into our shows, and it seems like we’re getting nowhere, reaching no one. I sometimes wonder if this is just how it’s going to be, for the rest of my life. And if so… What’s the point of continuing? When it just turns out the same way, time after time, show after show, what’s the point in doing it at all?

Well, those who know me may have heard my oft-used answer to that: Because the alternative is NOT doing theater, and that would be unthinkable.

It’s true. If you gave me a choice between never performing again, or performing for the rest of my life to nothing but completely empty houses… It would be a devastating decision to make, but it wouldn’t be a difficult one. Audience or not, theater is in my blood and in my soul. I have to do it. Which just makes it all the more frustrating to be stuck in one place.

A Matter of Perspective

Am I stuck in one place, though? It can feel that way sometimes. But what’s my basis for comparison? The audience for this show was disappointing. The audience for the previous show was disappointing. There have been plenty of disappointing audiences throughout my theatrical career. So it feels like it’s always the same.

But the way it feels isn’t always the way it is. You’ve no doubt heard the analogy of the frog in a pot of water. If you try to put it into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put it into a pot of room temperature water and slowly turn up the heat, a degree or two at a time, over an hour or two, the frog will stay in the pot, even when it reaches boiling. It’s become gradually used to its surroundings, so it doesn’t notice the heat. The analogy is used to illustrate how we don’t notice the danger or the terrible things around us, when we’ve gotten used to it over time. But it can hold true of good things, too. When progress is slow, we might not even realize when we’ve had success, because it feels basically the same as it did before.

The show I did in June, I was disappointed because there were only 10 people in the audience. Another show, which I did last year, had two performances, and only five or six people each night, tops. They were both major letdowns in a series of major letdowns I’ve had over the years. Why can’t we ever do any better?

But if you had quoted those numbers to our group in 2010, 2011, or 2012, I think we would have seen things differently. Our 2010 Christmas show had three performances, and one of those performances had zero people in the audience. Our 2011 Christmas show, two out of three nights had zero audience members. In 2012, one of our performances was for an audience of one, and one was for an audience of maybe two or three.

All three of those years, our “big crowd” performances were the Sunday matinees. After nonexistent and devastatingly tiny audiences for our evening shows, it was always a welcome relief on Sunday afternoon to see a decent amount of people, finally, come streaming into the theater. How many people did we have at an average matinee? Probably about 10.

The size of the crowd that now makes me throw up my hands and wonder why I keep going is the same size crowd that, 15 years ago, gave us hope. I feel like a failure, but in actuality, I’m just a frog, sitting in a pot of success.

A Reminder of Success

This is why I like Facebook memories. They can add a bit of perspective by providing a snapshot of where you were at different stages of your life. One in particular, a couple of months ago, was a real eye-opener. In early September of 2016, I posted, “I really want to do more projects involving puppets.”

In September of this year, when that showed up in my Facebook memories, I reposted it to my page and added a note. “Dear 2016 Steve: I have good news for you. Sincerely, 2025 Steve.”

I wish that I could talk to my 2016 self and show him some of the photos of our work with puppets, or videos of some of the puppet projects we’ve done, or even just our ever-expanding collection of puppets, which we’ve used in so many shows. So that during the many, many times between then and now when he worries that he’s not doing anything, not moving forward, he can have some idea of just what’s in store. In fact, I’d also show him photos and videos of our trip to Kazakhstan and the shows we did there, so he can see, quite literally, how far he’s going to go.

And likewise, I wish that my future self could do the same for me: let me experience what the pot of success is like in, say, 10 years, and just how jarringly different it is from what it feels like right now. So that I can better understand, in the moment, that some of the things that feel like failures are actually successes.

Persistence Hunters

Unfortunately, Mitch Hedberg was wrong. We can’t just find out where our dreams are going and hook up with them later. We have to take every step of the journey, even when we have no idea where we’re headed and often have trouble remembering where we’ve been, too.

The meme, on the other hand, is at least somewhat correct. We’re persistence hunters. We’re not built for speed. We’re built for endurance. If you sprint towards your goal, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to reach it. Things don’t go the way you thought they would; you get to where you’re going, but it’s still nowhere near where you need to be. It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, and it can burn you out if that’s all you’re focused on. But if you keep going, keep moving forward, even when the pace seems slow… Your dreams won’t exactly get tired and lie down, but eventually, you’ll catch up with them.

It’s frustrating when things don’t turn out the way I’d hoped. And yeah, I’ll sometimes throw up my hands and wonder what the point is of doing all of this, when it always seems like a failure. But what if I had given up in 2011, when we had two back-to-back performances with zero audience members? We never would have made it to audiences of five or ten.

What if, in 2017, I’d seen my Facebook memory from 2016 and just decided to forget the whole thing, since a year later, I still hadn’t done anything with puppets? I’d never have gotten to experience 2018, when I finally started acquiring puppets and writing them into plays. Or 2021, when they began to become a regular thing in our shows. Or 2024, when we did our first live, in-person, all-puppet performance.

Now, in 2025, there’s a puppet play that I really want to do. I’ve talked about it before. A bizarre and silly, fairytale-esque story called The Pound-a-Line Poet. I’ve been working with puppets, buying puppets, borrowing puppets, making puppets, and having puppets made for seven years now, but this project is still way beyond what I have the resources or the talent to pull off. It’s been on the back burner for a couple of years now, and sometimes it seems like I’ll never get to a point where it’s feasible for our group. It’s tempting just to forget the whole thing and write it off as a silly pipe dream.

But if I forget about it and stop working towards that goal, not only will I miss out on doing the play, I’ll also miss out on everything leading up to that point: all the tiny successes, all the little wins that feel like nothing in the moment, but are actually propelling my group, my project, and me, forward, one step at a time.

That’s why persistence is so important. It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to despair and wonder why things are turning out the way they are—or not turning out the way they aren’t. Why, no matter what we do and how far we go, we still seem so far from our goal. But it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon.

The longer we keep moving forward, the closer we’ll get, even when the pace seems slow. And the longer we stay in the pot, the more the heat of our success will increase. But only if we stay in the pot—even when it feels like nothing is happening. If we get out, we’ll miss it. But if we stay in the pot, eventually, success will bubble up all around us, and nobody will be able to mistake what’s happening. Not even us.