“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.”
-Henry Ford
PARADIGM SHIFT
The Truth About Overnight Success
Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic, reminds listeners in this podcast that overnight success, while it does happen, is rarely as instantaneous as it appears to be.
There are three general pathways to success:
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- Slow, steady and incremental growth of income and assets.
- Instant windfalls of winning the lottery, picking the winning investment, or inheriting a fortune.
- Slow, disciplined dedication to a craft which eventually hits a sudden tipping point and changes everything.
The first way is the most common way, even though wealth accumulation is not common in general.
The second way is extremely uncommon, and even when it happens, it often only provides a short burst of benefit before it’s run dry and essentially wasted.
The third way is how the greatest wealth often comes into being.
You personally have a unique blend of talents and passions which tailor you to a very specific and valuable niche. No one has the same mix of personality, experience, education, interest and talent that you have.
And because of that, you have something valuable to offer the world.
Not everyone takes the initiative to expend the energy necessary for exploring avenues with trial and error. But trial and error is the only way you raise chances of whittling away the chaff, and narrowing your focus in discovering your personal superpower.
It takes time to recognize and share this with the world. And that’s why those who chase quick riches will often fail, whereas those who navigate their lives around calculated risk-taking toward their interests and passions are far more likely to hit that tipping point of so-called “overnight success.”
But it’s not overnight. Intentional movement toward short- and medium-term goals keeps you from what Napoleon Hill calls “drifting.” And as long as you’re not drifting, you are learning valuable lessons from your successes and failures.
That journey of lessons accumulates interest, so to speak, and eventually hits that tipping point where wealth exponentially begins to increase.
The more experience you accumulate, the more niche becomes your expertise. Identifying that intersection of skill, passion and experience within yourself, and channeling it into focused effort, can pay greater dividends than any lottery win could hope to accomplish.
And only you, and those closest to you, will know how much preparation, discipline and intentionality came in advance of that sudden success.