I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most, if not all overnight successes you see are actually years in the making. Sure it may seem that a band becomes an overnight hit, or that a business owner hits it out of the park all of a sudden. It seems so easy, so effortless, and so lucky, doesn’t it?
What you don’t see is what it took to get to that point. You don’t see the years of practicing, trying, and failing. You don’t see the hundreds or thousands of times they had to try again. You don’t see all the sweat, tears, and disappointment of the overnight success. That’s why it’s easy to be a little jealous and to think that these people just got lucky.
The secret to becoming an overnight success, or have any type of success in any area of your life is to not let failure stop you. When you mess up, when people let you down, when things don’t work out the way you’d hoped, you don’t give up. Instead, you get up, you dust yourself off, and you try again. You gain experience, you learn from each failure, each mistake, and each disappointment and you get back to work. It doesn’t matter what area of your life you want to improve or what lofty goals and dreams you want to reach.
The secret to your success is to use failure to your advantage. Use it to push you towards trying one more time. Learn from the mistakes you make and learn to embrace failure. The faster you fail, the faster you’ll learn and get better. And that, of course, means that the faster you fail, the faster you’ll reach your goals in the end.
We think of failure as something negative, when it’s not. Successful people come to realize that. They may make it seem like everything is falling into their lap, but when you start to dig a little deeper they have their share of failures. What sets them apart is that they don’t mind those setbacks and mistakes. Instead, they use them to learn, get better, and stay motivated. And that’s what it takes for you to become an overnight success as well. Are you ready to embrace failure and try again until you too become an overnight success? If so, it’s time to get to work and start failing fast.