Last week I urged my business owner clients to ask themselves what they wanted to do next in their business and to think about the steps that could help move them toward that goal. It must have been contemplating that issue so much that got me to thinking about celebrity culture in a new way.

(Really, hold on, I think it will eventually make sense.)

It seems to me that almost everyone has at least one celebrity with whom they feel some connection. It also seems that those who make the deepest impression on the most lives are the ones who prove to have lasting careers that span time and, possibly more importantly, genre.

There is a reason that one-hit wonders and other flashes in the pan tend to become punchlines. They may inspire passion and quickly build huge fan bases, but if they never figure out what’s next, then those fans move on. I imagine that the reason many then become joke fodder is because we feel a bit taken in by something catchy or interesting, but then discover a lack of substance behind it.

I think this ties into the culture that grows around celebrity deaths. Of course, there is the curiosity factor just because these are people that we know about, but some of those deaths have impacts that many feel on a deeper level. I imagine we have all felt this at some time, and at times it may have even been unexpected.

So this past week I started to think of how all this was connected, and came to think that those whose deaths have the greatest effect are those we still wanted more from. We may not have known their answer to what was next for them, but we wanted to find out.

This is why there seems such power, and a bit of mystery, to the “27 Club,” a group of musicians who died at that age. It is a rather talented group that includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. They left behind a great body of work, but one can’t help but imagine what else they could have done.

Although this may seem a bit morbid, my thoughts did not end there, and I even thought one could find some inspiration in it.

For instead of thinking of what was taken away, spend some time thinking about performers who have inspired you in your life. Think of the ways that they had different works that touched you at different points, or maybe how the same work had enough depth to affect you in different ways at different points in your life. No matter who they are, or what they did, I would wager that you can see both evolution and depth in their work.

In there may be a little light into the key to success I was trying to hit upon last week. If these inspirations only ever did one thing, their appeal would have withered. Instead they did what they did well, but also built upon what they had done before. It would have been easy to sit on their laurels, but they kept moving and had answers to what they wanted to do next.

Here is to hoping you also have some of those answers.