Tale of two and their end result

When reading the “Subtle art” book, mentioned on the previous post, I came across mentions about two real life personalities, who witnessed similar incidents in their life and how they responded. The first one was about Dave Mustaine was a guitarist in an up-and-coming band. His tenure with them was short lived mainly because of his unruly nature and rude behavior fueled by substance abuse. He was kicked away from the group that went on to become one of the most popular music bands of all time, reveling in the genre of heavy metal. The band was Metallica. It is quite natural, looking back at the success story that Metallica became, for Dave to have heart burn over missed opportunity. He, in fact, was no loser either. He started his own band called Megadeth, that had its own fair share of success. Only difference being, if Metallica sold 100 million copies Megadeth’s success was a mere small percentage of what Metallica could achieve. This was always lingering on Dave’s mind, and he could never ever come out of that feeling of being a distant second in the success list when compared to Metallica. Even though he should’ve been feeling guilty over his mistakes, he remained unhappy about his ouster. Wonder if he would’ve felt as bad, had Metallica flunked and his own group was the numero uno. 

The second one was about Pete Best. THE drummer of THE BEATLES. His story sounds a bit converse to what happened for Dave. The rest of the Beatles were scared of his popularity and in their jealousy, they got him fired from the troupe. Apparently, Pete was the best looking of the lot and it was his face on the covers for the time he was with Beatles. Because of insecurity and feeling sidelined by his popularity, the rest of them ganged up against Pete and got him removed from their troupe. This is the controversial version of the ouster with the popular one being, Best was not as per his name when it came to music. Soon, Ringo Starr replaced Pete and rest was history as Beatlemania swept the globe for decades. Even till date, there is some or other song of Beatles that gets played across the globe, every single day. Their music continues to inspire millions and provides much needed relief in this stress filled world. But that was not the case for Pete. Having been punished for literally no fault of his, the fallout took a toll on his life. For a while he was on a drunken spiral and eventually settled for a domestic life that was much less subdued from public glare. He is still alive I guess happily settled with his wife and grand kids. 

I am not the expert to compare the scale of success of Metallica vs Beatles. I am no expert again to pass a verdict on after-getting kicked off-life of Dave and Pete. The author of the “Subtle art” book had concluded that, even though Megadeth was quite successful, Dave rued that he couldn’t be as successful as Metallica. While even though Pete was totally wiped off from the music field, he still was contented with the life he led and is seemingly happier. Despite being faced with similar scenario, the individual takes decided on their future, where one resulted in heart burn and other is still going strong on the happiness index. The author felt that Pete knew when to let it go and decided to move on, ended up doing things that he could control. While Dave, still being one of the most successful musicians in his genre, never had that feeling of completeness. For he kept comparing his 10 million sales with the 100 million sales figures of Metallica. He was unable to acknowledge his own success as he kept measuring himself against what he defined as the absolute metric – to beat Metallica. To outperform the band that chucked him.

End of the day, for a third person, both Megadeth and Metallica could’ve been 2 top bands of that genre. But individually, Dave felt like a failure because, he chose to think like that. Pete felt more contented because he chose to feel like that. The choice is always ours as to how we want to feel. For a totally different reason, these stories resonated majorly with me and thought will share it as a post.