Overnight Success Just Doesn’t Exist
After a while, you begin to wonder:
If they can accomplish all that so fast, what’s my problem?
The inevitable conclusion of this sort of self-doubt is this: “I don’t have
whatever they have. I’d better give up now.” Suddenly, you’ve given up on your
project before you’ve put in any real effort at all, all because the rewards
didn’t appear on Day 2.
Everyone Loves an Overnight Success Story
We live in a world of instant gratification. We demand information and
entertainment immediately. We want our products delivered today. We even check
Facebook on our phones at stoplights.
We love the idea of sudden success because it skips the hard part: The
work.
Quick success is all the dream and none of the labour. It’s a signal you’re
unique, that there’s something special about you that’s more capable or
deserving of success compared to others.
It doesn’t help when we’re constantly being bombarded with images and stories
of supposed meteoric overnight successes. No one writes about the slow and
agonizing grind most entrepreneurs have to push through every day.
You never read stories about the hours someone spent editing product photos.
No one talks about the morning slog of getting through their inbox. Or about
the hours they spent learning how Facebook ads work, just to create one that
actually gets a click.
There’s just no drama in any of that.
Moreover, you need to take these so-called success stories with a grain of
salt.
Further, we often confuse overnight success with early success.
We see a young person achieve something great and assume it happened
instantly. How else could a 25-year-old make a millions if not overnight?
So, it’s not weird that you want to skim over the hard work researching how to
be successful, and instead aim to achieve overnight success.
Who wouldn’t?
There’s just one problem.
Overnight Success Just Doesn’t Exist
Obviously, success is real.
And of course, it’s entirely possible for an entrepreneur to experience
periods of sudden growth. In fact, many can point to a time when “things
really picked up.
In contrast, the concept of overnight success is disingenuous.
It just doesn’t exist.
That said, it’s not unusual for an entrepreneurial journey to seem like an
overnight success. From the outside, a person might be saying, “Wow! That
business exploded overnight.”
In reality, a dedicated entrepreneur has toiled for months–or even years–to
learn how to be successful and get to the point where someone takes
notice.
The Truth About Success in Life
What is success, exactly?
No miracle shake can actually cut inches off your waist. There’s no sleep
rhythm that will add hours to your day. And there’s no “hack” that will flood
your business with orders and turn you into an overnight success.
The only way to achieve success in life is to work hard and learn from your
failures. If you’re constantly seduced by shortcuts and gimmicks, you’ll trap
yourself in a cycle of frustration and failure (but not the good, learning
kind of failure).
Building anything takes time.
In most cases, the changes are incremental–even invisible. But one day, those
little changes will amount to something greater, and everyone will point to
you and say, “Look at that overnight success!”
Even if it were possible, no one should achieve success overnight.
Why?
Because instant success means you didn’t earn it. It means you’re not ready
for it. It means you’d probably screw things up the next day, costing yourself
a lot of money or damage to your brand.
Here’s an example:
You wake up the day after your grand opening to 10,000 orders. But your
excitement wanes when you realize you’ve set your pricing rules improperly and
undercharged for most of your products.
Now you have to eat the difference in pricing for those orders or refund
everyone’s money.
Neither option is pleasant.
This is a hard lesson to learn, but in this case, it’s far more painful than
it needed to be. If you learned about your pricing rules when you only had a
few orders on the table, you could have learned the lesson and resolved the
issue quickly, without suffering a headache.
In this case, the overnight “success” exacerbated the problem.
The truth about success is that there is no shortcut. It must be earned.
Success comes when you decide to stop living passively. It comes when you
abandon the “everything will work out” mentality. It comes when you stop
watching Netflix and start creating your own opportunities.
The key to success is hard work and learning. Once you’ve got all the right
tools in your kit and combine them with a dedicated work ethic, success
becomes inevitable.
So ask yourself:
Do you have the determination to toil on your site and brand long before
making a single sale?
Can you muster the courage to send emails to a small list, or create content
for a Facebook page only friends have (reluctantly) liked?
Will you wake up an hour earlier or give up your lunch to work on building
your dream?
Can you push through when you’re frustrated or feeling beat down?
Do you have faith in your process, your tools, and yourself?
If you answered “yes” to these questions, you can learn how to be successful.
But remember: It won’t happen overnight.
Face your venture with courage, humility, and patience. As long as you push
your business, you’ll continue to fail, because failure is a part of growth.
But over time, the sting of failure will numb, and you’ll finally find
yourself seeking failure for the learning opportunity that follows.
That’s the key to success.
Author: Dennis Hammer
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