It always annoys me when people talk about overnight successes. No doubt there are people who rise to fame and it seems like an overnight success. However, there’s generally a long road of struggle and hardship that happened before people recognize the person. We rarely acknowledge the hard work someone puts in before they rise to success.
This was highlighted really well by David Chou when he shared this awesome iceberg image:
A lot of work comes with success. Most people never see the hard work behind it pic.twitter.com/yCOcpVub4Q
— David Chou (@dchou1107) August 31, 2017
David Chou is absolutely right. There’s a lot of work that comes with success and most of the time that work is “underwater” and so people don’t recognize it.
We could cover each of the items listed underwater in the image above, but the one that I like to point out most is Failure. Every successful person I’ve ever met has also had a wide variety of times when they’ve failed. In fact, in most cases, those failures are what end up leading them to be successful. Not necessarily the failures in themselves, but the things they learned from their failures is what enabled them to be successful.
Along with using your failures as stepping stones as opposed to impediments, success requires a special determination to do the hard work, persevere, and sacrifice. Far too many people think that they can make it on wits alone. I’ll take someone with an average intellect that works hard over a brilliant intellect who doesn’t know how to work any day.
Take a look at your career. Are you doing the work necessary to achieve the success you want to achieve? If you’re not, what can you change so you start doing it?