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How the Myth of ‘Overnight Success' Can Keep You Stuck Since early childhood, we’ve all been exposed to instant-success stories of men and women going from zero to hero literally overnight. However, any honest entrepreneur will tell you that there is more to their story than meets the eye. With most successful people, what we call “overnight success” is the result of countless sleepless nights, countless hours of hard work, many failures, and maybe a network of people that helped them get started. Instant success is rarer than winning the lottery, but unfortunately, many people live with the idea that overnight success can happen to them too if they just come up with a revolutionary idea or product that other people love and enjoy. However, chasing the instant-success unicorn can keep you stuck for years or may lead to your business’ downfall. Why Is Overnight Success a Myth? Overnight success is a myth because instant success has always been the exception. While for a select few, instant success is achieved very fast, for most of us, it takes years, if not decades, of hard work to achieve it. Usually, what most people call an “overnight success,” when it comes to a business, is a product or service that has been finetuned for years, but the public had no idea about it. Any honest businessman will agree that achieving success can be likened to a marathon, not a sprint. Another reason overnight success is a myth is that people are so busy and biased that they fail to take the time to get all the information behind a success story. A lightning-fast rise to stardom is usually the result of thousands of hours spent perfecting the product, smoothing out rough patches before starting the business, and building all the connections that helped them get started. When it comes to instant-success stories, the media will rarely tell you the whole story. For instance, did you know that decades ago, Steve Jobs was fired by Apple for investing the company’s resources into some of its biggest failures like the Apple III or Macintosh Office? Did you know that the founders of AirBnb, a company now worth more than $25 billion, had to max out their credit cards and sell cereals in custom boxes to pay their rent while their budding business was refusing to take off? Also, did you know that video games like Subnautica, which are considered a textbook example of overnight success, took developers years to create and were so resource-draining that pushed the whole team to the “brink of financial disaster” in their own words? There are countless similar stories behind insanely successful people no one is telling you about because we all love a good old, Hollywood-style overnight success story. How ‘Overnight Success’ Can Keep You Stuck People who believe in overnight success stories are blind to the journey that led to that success. And if they ignore the hard work, sacrifices, and sweat and tears behind a success story, they will tend to become impatient when they hit a rough patch and make poor judgments, which can later undermine their success. Also, if you believe in overnight success, you risk being jealous of those whom you perceive as more successful than you, or you might be sad that you are not good enough to be successful since you “don’t have what it takes.” Such a mindset is a recipe for failure in any pursuit of success, regardless of how talented a person may be. In other words, an ‘overnight success’ mindset can weigh you down and prevent you from achieving success on your own terms. Conclusion We like to believe that overnight success stories are real, and long to become protagonists of such stories ourselves. But genuine overnight success is so rare that one is more likely to win the lottery than achieve it. Overnight success can be a very toxic belief as it can keep you stuck for years by setting unrealistic expectations, which can only fuel poor judgment and stress. Achieving success can be done from a place of truth, namely that genuine success takes years of hard work and struggle to reach. As Leslie Jones once aptly put it, “People think I’m an overnight success. No. It’s just that you all found me overnight.”

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How the Myth of ‘Overnight Success’ Can Keep You Stuck

Since early childhood, we’ve all been exposed to instant-success stories of men and women going from zero to…

01/04/2023