The Myth of Overnight Success

In September, 1963, golfer Floyd Root started hitting golf balls at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and kept hitting them non-stop, across country, for 13 months until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. He lost 3,511 golf balls along the way. To my knowledge, his “achievement” still stands as a record today.

The late sports super-agent Mark McCormack, who I appeared on a number of programs with as a speaker, told me he thought most avid golfers approach their weekend game with far more determination, drive, persistence, patience and sustained interest than they do their careers or businesses – and if they flipped their passions, they’d all wind up millionaires many times over. Obviously, Mr. Root was particularly driven, persistent and patient!

The public, outside someone’s life looking, all too often sees the illusion of overnight success. It rarely occurs in reality. Most successes are the natural harvest of a lot of years, a lot of long hours, a lot of patient and persistent seed planting and fertilizing and care. Because people believe too much in the pleasing but mythical possibility of overnight success, they are too quick to give up on their ideas and themselves, too quick to give into disappointment, too easily lured and seduced by the promise of one magic pill after another.

It is quite common to find people willing to devote 3 or 4 consecutive hours at a time to playing a game of golf, playing a video game, or some other recreational pursuit, but quite uncommon to find those same people devoting 3 or 4 hours at a time to reading or studying self-improvement, career improvement or business improvement materials, studying at the library, or even working diligently on a business project.

Similarly, it’s common to see people start entrepreneurial enterprises; comparatively rare to see them sticking to them long enough to achieve success. The much cited statistics about the high rate of business failure are as big an illusion as is overnight success. They don’t accurately measure “failure”; they mostly represent “quitting.”

— Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is an author, consultant and business coach. Additional information at www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com