[email protected]
The media loves to highlight individuals who they see as an overnight success:
- Justin Bieber’s viral You Tube videos helped him get a record deal and instant fame.
- Joe Namath gained immediate fame when he delivered on his promise that the Jets would win the Superbowl in 1968.
- JK Rowling’s books seemed to take the world by storm in the late 1990s.
- Elon Musk was just another Dreamer until his Falcon rocket reached orbit. Seemingly, overnight Musk became a household name.
The media just loves instant success stories, which mistakenly portrays success as some pivotal event.
The reality is, success takes a long time and often goes unnoticed, as it is occurring, to the beneficiaries of success. Most successful people don’t see, in real time, the pivotal points of their success. Only in hindsight, and many years later, are they able to identify the actual moment they turned the corner and realized success.
This is because, for the vast majority of successful people, success is not an event. It is a process or progression. You just don’t see success happening, even when it’s happening in real time, because the “success event” is actually just a progression of one of many subtle “success events”.
The point I’m trying to make here is that, barring the rare overnight success exceptions, “success” is not an event. It is the culmination of progressing from one goal to the next, from one dream to the next, from one minor success to the next.
Success is very much like snow falling on the side of a mountain. You don’t see the snow accumulating and the snow bank growing. Then one day, there is an avalanche.
Success may reward you financially with a windfall but it is a windfall that takes many years to occur. It the byproduct of years and years of devoted focus, hard work and persistence.
“It can take a lifetime to become an overnight success.”
” It is the culmination of progressing from one goal to the next, from one dream to the next, from one minor success to another minor success.”..RIGHT!
GREAT METAPHOR: “Success is very much like snow falling on the side of a mountain. You don’t see the snow accumulating and the snow bank growing. Then one day, there is an avalanche.” Mine is “success or money is like a snowball at the top of the hill – push it and what do you have at the bottom? A mountain of success or money!”
Great reminder and point. Thank you.
My aunt wrote the “The Power of Love”, the very famous song sung by Celine Dion. She wrote MANY songs before hitting that level of success. It took me a while to put away my first 100k. The 2nd 200k was much faster, and the 3rd, 4th, etc, were even faster than the 2nd.