The 1,001-Night Success

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Throughout most of the twentieth century people viewed the world as black and white. Allies versus the Axis powers, NATO versus the Soviet Bloc. Our movies were good guys versus bad guys and our heroes flawless. Superman, Captain America, James Bond, Rocky, and John Wayne were all good, simply good. Their movies had a simple plot, good guy stops bad guy.

During most of the last century, American CEOs, politicians, and celebrities were seen as flawless. Scandals and affairs were hushed up to preserve the spotless personal brands of the titans of industry to which Americans, and people all over the world would aspire.

Things got more complex starting around the 1990s. Our movies began to have more antiheroes and flawed heroes (still mainly heroes, not yet heroines), like Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Unforgiven. In this movie Eastwood’s gunslinger is hired to bring justice to wronged women, but his character is no angel. (Fun fact, many of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns were remakes of Japanese samurai films from Akira Kurosawa; Unforgiven, did the reverse when it was remade as a Meiji era Japanese film.)

As we began the new century people began to open up about failures. This wasn’t just in our movies. Tech startups were the hot industry (and still are to this day) but they had a high failure rate. Unlike the unblemished icons before them, it was ok that the founder and celebrity CEOs weren’t successful 100% of the time. It almost felt like there was a competition for CEOs and founders to show off mistakes and failures so that as a role model they could feel more relatable.

Personally, I’m glad we’re open about it. It makes success seem more realistic and attainable to anyone who isn't perfect (which is all of us). It’s a huge step forward from the perspective of societal growth. But something is still missing.

These stories are often “I did X, and it failed, but then I did Y, and now I’m wildly successful.” Admitting that it wasn’t “I only did Y and now I’m rich” in some late-night-get-rich-quick-infomercial-esq vignette is a good first step. But it still oversimplifies the long path of becoming successful; it doesn’t talk about the process.

Edison is most famous for bringing the lightbulb to the mass market. (He’s probably technically most famous for inventing the lightbulb, but that’s not quite true; the lightbulb was already invented, but it was costly and short lived, he made ones that were affordable and long-lasting.) Different sources list different numbers for the tally of his light bulb experiments, but they all put it at hundreds, if not thousands, of attempts. He didn’t just have one failure, he had over a thousand. He didn’t try to create one thing which failed and moved on to something else, he failed many times to do the one thing before he got it right.

We live in a world of instant success. A video goes viral and suddenly a person or brand is famous. Oprah puts you in her book club and you’re an instant success. One day you’re making videos on YouTube, the next day a talent scout finds you and you become a rockstar (or maybe a crimefighting beaver).

But that’s not the reality, those stories are the exceptions, not the rule. Music legend Dave Grohl famously commented about this trend to Delta Sky Magazine,

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When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice , then they think, 'Oh, okay, that's how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight f****** hours with 800 people at a convention centre and then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it's not f****** good enough.' Can you imagine? It's destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old f****** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they'll suck, too. And then they'll f******* start playing and they'll have the best time they've ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they'll become Nirvana. Because that's exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some s***** old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-a** s***, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don't need a f****** computer or the Internet or The Voice or American Idol.

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Jack Canfield and Marc Victor Hansen, authors of the bestselling book and later series Chicken Soup for the Soul supposedly each reached out to five people a day to promote their book (he mentions it in this ad for one of his courses). They did this day after day, month after month until it finally got them traction. It’s that daily grind that leads to success, even if the return on any given effort may not be the same and some do seem to lead to big breakthroughs.

In my article The Entrepreneur’s Prayer I wrote:

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To be an entrepreneur is to live in a world of rejection. You hear the word “no” constantly, multiple times a day. NO, I won’t invest. NO, I won’t work for you. NO, I won’t buy your product. NO, I won’t partner with you. NO, I don’t even want to take a meeting with you. No. No! NO!

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You face rejection after rejection day after day and need to persevere.

Right now as I promote Brain Bump I go on podcast after podcast touting it to people to download and use (speaking of which, it’s a completely free app to help you retain and use what you learn, so check it out at https://brainbumpapp.com/); I speak to authors, speakers, podcasters and others asking them to get their content on the app (for free). It’s not a huge success . . . yet. But I keep going because I know that it’s the small steps forward, added together, that most often lead to the big success down the road.

In this world of always-on, 24-hour news, and viral posts we forget that most success is not instantaneous. For every founder that went from idea to unicorn in a few years there are hundreds more who are successful but only after slogging through challenge after challenge for many years.

Even when it’s an “overnight success,” it is one only because of the hard work it took to get there. All the failed experiments, wrong markets, insufficient MVP, missing features, wrong price, wrong marketing, all the wrong, wrong, wrong approaches . . . but eventually it can click and start to work. Sometimes it comes together and moves slowly, like getting a flywheel going; other times it’s like you’re pulling as hard as you can and then suddenly you get a ductile failure (e.g. pushing a dowel into a foam block and you face resistance, resistance, resistance, until suddenly it gives way, and you push the dowel all the way through). The ductile failure (which is a success from the point of view of the person trying to push the dowel through) didn’t just happen magically, it came from the pushing that seemed to be making little headway up until the moment it gave way. Tiny drips until suddenly the dam holding back success bursts.

This is the real story of success, it’s many days and nights of hard work. Unfortunately, it’s not a good story. Every A-team episode devoted the sixty seconds around minute fifty-two of the episode for the montage of hard work as the plan came together. What would take most people hours of hard work, they do in seconds. The fight training by Rocky or Daniel LaRusso, Baby or Alex Owens learning to dance, or even the Breakfast Club bonding, all happened in about the same time it’s taking you to read this article. (It’s almost over, what do you mean you’re not ready to crane kick Drago to the tune of She’s a Maniac?!?!) Even today’s movies use a montage because no one wants to watch hours of the hero (or heroine–because now we do have those in movies) training, searching, building, or doing the not-so-telegenic hard work which is what it actually takes to be successful.

Hollywood cuts it out because it’s not entertaining, and no one wants to sit through a months-long movie of monotony. That’s fine for movies where we go for entertainment, but when it comes to teaching by example, we need to provide a little more clarity. We need to put the stories of the long, boring hard work, often when the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t visible, into the celebrity narratives because this is reality.

We the audience like to hear the celebrity stories of hijinks on the set or behind the scenes in their blockbuster movies; we need to hear more often how they had Ramen noodle dinners for years trying to hone their craft and the many, many failed auditions until they got their first, small break. We need these stories from celebrities, athletes, founders and CEOs, and everyone. We need to hear how between X that failed and Y that worked there were countless hours of work and setbacks.

Overnight success almost never is; it comes from the thousands of nights of work that preceded it. Your glasses are always in the last place you looked, but it was found there only after you looked elsewhere prior. The success that finally came was only because it didn’t come from all those earlier attempts, but those earlier attempts were part of the process (and unlike looking for your glasses in the wrong place, may have been key steps in order to get you there). We need to make sure everyone knows that so we can train future generations in the value of hard work.

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