What are your changes of being the next overnight success? Is overnight success a myth? Or on the contrary, you can realisticly expect to be the next in line? Answers inside….
So yesterday we talked about luck. How much of a factor luck is in in your success. And my take is that luck doesn't have anything to do with success. It's more about “preparation meets opportunity”. And so following this discussion I wanted to like touch base on expectations. OK. Because for now we've talked about mind-set and I wanted to touch base on expectations as well.
And what I want to talk about today is the myth of overnight success, which is closely related to what we discussed yesterday. So it's a logical next step to what we discussed yesterday. Overnight success. So what's overnight success and why do we hear this term all the time?
If you ask me it's a myth right? It's well someone who's a nobody and you know overnight they become this big huge star. And the reason why we hear so much about overnight success and all that stuff is because it sells papers and it sells the books and stuff like that.
So let me give you an example. So it's an example of basketball. Again I'm a huge fan of basketball and a few years ago there was this guy called Jeremy Lin. So if you're if you're listening to this from New York or if you like the NBA, you might know who this guy. Jeremy Lin was playing for the New York Knicks and he was at the bottom of the bench. He never actually got a chance to play because there were I think three or four people before him in the roster.
So the chances of him playing were really slim. So the dude never actually played in the games. OK. And what happened is that the star player got injured the other players got injured as well. So he basically ended up having to go on the big stage.
Well, first game he scored like 30 points or something with game winners and then he had a series of games like I think six consecutive games at like 30 points or whatever and ha had like two or three game winners this Sunday. And the dude became a huge star! So his Jersey was the biggest seller in the entire league. And like two weeks before people didn't know the guy.
So people are calling him an overnight success which you know, when you listen to the story, you’re like “oh yeah the dude was an overnight success because he used to be a nobody and then you know the next thing you know he's this big star”. He managed to sign this huge contract.
What I want to tell you in the story is so if you if you research Jeremy Lin, it will tell you about the overnight success and the rise to stardom and blah blah blah. But there is one thing that you need to understand. Jeremy Lin was in the NBA already!
Do you know how much effort and how much work you need to put in to get in the NBA? The percentage of people who make it to the NBA is like, point five percent of the people actually want to make it. OK. So the dude was in the NBA and that tells you something. It's not like you know, he never played basketball and then overnight he became a star. Yes.
But he was in the NBA. And this is something people forget. The dude was already playing basketball. He was a professional in the best league on the planet and he had been drafted by a team. Every year teams will select a bunch of players from let's say three hundred, and I think it's like ninety six or 100 people will get hired and the rest they have to go to Europe or go to some other league.
So he went through all these steps and he was in the NBA buddy! So it's not like he was an overnight success at all! What happened is that the public discovered him overnight. But he had been there for a while.
Are You Going To Be The Next Overnight Success?
And so I wanted to tell the story because a lot of people expect that when they have this like idea and stuff that it's going to be an overnight success, because they heard about overnight successes from the press on television and stuff like that. So you have to prepare yourself for it.
Success is something that you will build and it will take some time and some dedication. OK. Just like this example I gave you with Jeremy Lin It took a lot of time and dedication for him to train all this life to be in the NBA. It was in the best league on the planet. And then he got his chance to shine at some point and he was prepared.
You know just like I told you yesterday when opportunity meets preparation this is when you have what people call luck. Right. And it's the same thing for overnight success. It's the exact same thing. You got the opportunity to shine and the world discovers your message or service or the product that you created.
And this is when you can make it big. But it doesn't mean that I mean you didn't prepare anything for it.
So you have to be ready for you know dedication time spent and you have to be ready for trials and error. Right? Because if something blows up overnight, basically what tells you that this was the original form of that product or service? OK. So do you think that when they first created that product or service that blew up, was it exactly as it is today?
I'm pretty sure that it's not the case. I'm pretty sure that they made changes to it. So they were going in one direction that wasn't working that well and then they adjusted based on what the market said and the feedback they had. So they realized that maybe they were doing something wrong and then they changed something.
So they've made adjustments and that adjustment helps them get more recognition and then boom all of over of all of a sudden you hear about the company. But the company may have been there for like five years or something. OK. So you have to understand that so it's going to be a lot of trials and errors.
So you're going to try. You know, door one doesn't work, door two doesn't work and eventually door five will work after you made the changes you know.
So it's very very important for me that you guys understand this because most of your projects, especially in the beginning, will fail or need to be tweaked or altered, due to trial and error.
So people you know people might call it failure or something. It's not a failure right. You learn stuff when you started these projects. You learn stuff; you get more familiar with stuff. You know what doesn't work. You can figure out why it didn’t work and there are things that you might have learned while working on that project.
It’s very important because if you have the wrong expectations going in to this business, at the first setback you'll be like oh you know what. I suck. Let's give up. And that's the last thing you want to do. Just don't assume that you're going to be an overnight success because it actually doesn't exist. You have to be prepared for everything that's going to happen to you.
And now what I want you to do is to realize that you might not win your first race. OK. So if you don't win your first race it's OK. if you don't win the second or the third it's OK. All right. Because you know again we're living in the information age and digital age and you can start projects left and right.
Only it's not one project that’s going to take your lifetime savings and stuff. So run the few races and eventually you will get there. But don't expect to run the first race and make it big, because this is going to kill your motivation and your self-esteem, if the first race doesn't go according to plan.
