Sixth Sense- Secret of My Failure

It was just a regular day – I was talking with my boss about someone who had ghosted him and

What a great idea for a LinkedIn article!

I’ve been writing articles here since the summer and had been blown away by the response. A couple made it to 4,000+ likes; the 5,000 milestone was looking like an elusive one.

I knew this one was different when it has 1,500 likes after 12 hours and 3,500 after a day. Every second I was receiving a notification. I try to respond to everyone who likes the piece or leaves a comment, but here it was just too hard. Apologies if I missed anyone.

When the dust settled (as of now), the numbers are:

225,928 views

10,188 likes

1,003 comments

878 shares

In retrospect, it should have been obvious. LinkedIn is the go-to place of many looking for a job and for many of them, ghosting is a huge pain point. Already vulnerable and anxious, the trauma of being ghosted can make a difficult experience even more harrowing.

The post was therapeutic and spoke to many in a way none of my previous pieces had. I knew I had struck a chord when I saw a whole slew of other articles about ghosting appear.

It could be that I never reach these heights again.

The problem with achieving metrics on such a grandiose level is that you may start thinking you've cracked the recipe for success. If you do start thinking this, you'd be horribly mistaken which is why success itself is one of biggest obstacles for ever achieving it again.

In being so successful, we create a rod for our own backs.

"Why didn't you achieve the same numbers as last year?" bosses will demand.

"Because last year was an unprecedented record year" we will answer.

In many instances, the only place to go is down.

We see this time and time again with the one-hit wonder, the dreaded label that plagues musicians who are unable to replicate their success.

In trying to replicate success, they will replicate everything and release a song that sounds exactly the same as the first.

It’s no coincidence that we’ve barely heard a peep from Psy since 2012. When anthropologists study us, they will be rendered clueless as to why Gangnam Style was such a hit.

The Academy Awards are next week and winning an award can prove a career curse as it's been for actors such as Cuba Gooding Jr, Renee Zellweger, and Helen Hunt. Zellweger was able to put the ignominy of Nurse Betty behind her to have three straight Oscar nominations. The third was for Cold Mountain which saw her win the Oscar and she hasn't been nominated since.

Speaking of the Academy Awards, 20 years ago, American Beauty cleaned up. Nominated for 9 Oscars, it won 5 including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography. A loser in two of those categories was M. Night Shyamalan whose Sixth Sense went 0-6 that night.

No person typifies the rise and fall that comes with success more than Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense was a phenomenal movie which made Shyamalan the hottest of hot things in Hollywood.

For his next movie Unbreakable, he was offered 5 million for the script and another 5 million to direct. From there it’s all been downhill culminating in After Earth which is as bad a movie as could possibly be.

His new movie Glass is out to tepid reactions. It's testimony to the brilliance of The Sixth Sense that 20 years later, he's still given more opportunities. 

How does one avoid this rollercoaster? The only way is to stay true to yourself. Success means doors will open and you’re going to have a lot of people attracted to you, inundating you with offers. They will want to hitch you to their wagon. Stay humble and don’t let it get to you. Those who’ve been able to (Spielberg, Federer, Brady, Buffett, Branson, Le Bron) have sustained success.

• Don't get seduced by dollar signs.
• Don’t let people hijack your brand for their own purposes.
• Don't let the big brands cannibalize you. How many times does a person who's a big fish in a small pond move to a bigger pond and get swallowed up entirely??

Virality may not come again, but if you're true to yourself, knowing you did it once can be sufficient.

A person who knew better about this than anybody was Joseph Heller. The author of Catch-22, one of the best and most successful books ever written. With a lot of hype and expectation, his subsequent books didn’t hit anywhere the same heights.

When asked why he hadn’t written anything as good as Catch-22 he had the most magnificent answer. Who has?