The myth of overnight success

“A very common trope in the history of technology is that it takes decades to create an overnight success.” – Tom Standage

Introduction

We live in a world of instant gratification. We’re a generation that is obsessed with overnight success stories.?

We live in a country where we hear some tales about entrepreneurs who find instant success, wealth, and fame. It misrepresents the processes by which entrepreneurs validate their ideas, iterate their products, and even come up with their concepts in the first place. And when you’re an entrepreneur, it can be a trap, teaching you a false conception of the process by which startups grow and thrive—and a false idea of what thriving looks and feels like.

The truth, however, is that easy, overnight success is a myth. They’re carefully crafted narratives, which we conveniently buy into as a form of wish fulfillment. The myth goes like this. You have an idea, build a product, and get super rich immediately. The story is an oversimplification, at best.?

Instead, the road to success is long, twisty, and fraught with hardship.?

The reality

We all know that social media can be misleading because everyone is curating their show. The result is that people end up comparing their actual life to someone else’s photoshopped perfection.??????????

For businesses, there’s an ecosystem of accounts and companies telling people they can achieve success with very little failure or friction, and very quickly. It’s backed by thought leaders that focus on short-term successes — doubling followers in a month or tripling revenue in 30 days.?

What most people call "overnight success" is the market suddenly realizing the value of a great product or service that had been kept in obscurity for too long while its creators refused to give up.

People like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos did not become successful overnight. They dedicated years to learning and perfecting their craft, during which they experienced disappointment, reinvention, and success. Yes, they did not endure the decades of trial and error most of us have; yet that does not mean their success was void of effort, disappointment, struggle, and the like.

In conclusion, the idea of overnight success is, by all means, a misconception. Planning one’s life around it is plain senseless.

To understand why this narrative is misleading, let’s look at a startup's process on its journey.?

Take the now-ubiquitous Amazon, for example,?

While its current circumstances can lead to some post hoc rationalization that the company was always destined for greatness, it took years to reach its status.?

The company started as an online bookstore in 1994, years before many of us had logged on to the internet, and it was another four years before they expanded beyond just selling books and moved into DVDs and CDs.?

Granting that it had its IPO in 1997 and was already successful by any measure, that still represents years of hard work required to get Amazon to the point where it could grow into what we now know, and that doesn’t even include the thinking and planning and gestating that comes before the formal founding of any company.

The idea takes development

Ideas are useless on their own, and new businesses don't start life as ideas, but as solutions to existing problems.

Most startup ideas never leave the brain of the person with the idea because the person with the idea never takes action. "Action" doesn't mean writing the idea down (although that's as good a first step as any). "Action" doesn't mean sharing the idea with others (unless those others have the skills and resources to help).

Despite what you see in Hollywood plot twists, the vast majority of great business ideas are not lightning strikes of instant inspiration. Inspiration can indeed strike quickly, but the bolt it produces doesn't accelerate an idea from 0 mph to 100 mph. Bolts of inspiration usually only become great ideas when that idea has been stuck at 60 mph for a while. It takes execution, exposure, and refinement, over a long period, to work all of the terrible out of the idea and make it viable -- worth doing.?

Take Google for example

The birth of Google is another example of a now-massive entity that didn’t become so overnight. Starting with a basic web crawler built in 1996 during their time at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin eventually turned that idea into a company that touches seemingly every part of our digital lives.?

But the journey to the top was long - it took over a year before the nascent company even came to the name Google to use for their BackRub project. And the advent of the suite of products that have become indispensable to many of us was still years away, meaning that the company and its founders were left to continue to work toward that future.

It takes at least a few months to turn a solution into a viable product

I'd be willing to bet that virtually every person reading this post has, at some point in their life, been introduced to a successful new product and thought to themselves: "I had the idea for that years ago."

Yes, you probably had the idea. You just didn't solve the problem.

But even the most game-changing solution doesn't change the game on its own. The solution still needs to be packaged, built, priced, and delivered to a market waiting to purchase it.

It takes at least a few months just to get to a minimum viable product. That product will then be refined perpetually over even more time, resulting in the game-changer we're all hoping for.

Embrace creative failure

As well as being a key part of the iterative approach, failure is a natural and inevitable part of creativity that can lengthen the creative process. However, we tend to shy away from failure when thinking about the ideal journey.?

Many people believe this is because we have been conditioned to view failure as something final that we need to avoid at all costs, rather than an inevitable and even valuable stage of the journey.

If you don’t succeed the first time, it’s easy to get discouraged and believe it means you lack creative ability. However, history is littered with examples of failures by people who went on to have huge creative success:

• Bill Gates’ first company went bankrupt.
• Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.
• Walt Disney was fired from his job at a newspaper due to a ‘lack of imagination.”
• Oprah Winfrey got fired from her first TV job as an anchor.

The idea of overnight success is both a hope for some and an absolution for others. Depending on the entrepreneur, it is an ambition to be achieved or a reason for their continued struggles. For the hopelessly optimistic, it’s a lottery ticket out there to be had, a magic formula to be found. Conversely, by viewing the success of Amazon or Google as inevitable, the cynical or failed entrepreneur can frame their company’s fortunes — indeed, any company — as a function of fate rather than the result of a series of decisions, good and bad.

The truth about success in life

No miracle shake can cut inches off your waist. No sleep rhythm will add hours to your day. And there’s no “hack” that will flood your store 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 valuable 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.