Overnight Success Takes Years, and That’s OK
Why do we tend to imagine successful people as having brilliant ideas right from the get-go? I know with the people I admire, I often assume that their businesses were born fully-formed as an idea — a bit like Venus emerging from the sea. Well, one of my biggest learnings from ThePowerMBA so far is that this really is not the case. Not for anyone. In fact, for most people, success takes far longer and looks far more chaotic than we imagine. It’s less Venus emerging from the sea; more building a sandcastle on the shore, and seeing which design stands up best to the tide.
I’m about three months into ThePowerMBA so far. We've covered a lot of content, ranging from Business Model Analysis (where we learned to diagnose any kind of business model) to Engines of Growth (unit economics and metrics of growth), to segmenting and targeting our markets, and creating and communicating our value proposition so that it packs a punch (including some really intuitive tools like the Value Curve).
For me, the single biggest value-add of the programme has been that all this theory is constantly fleshed out through real-life case studies.
So far, we’ve met the founders and executives of Shazam, Waze, Sugarfina, Rent The Runway, and many more. Without fail, they speak very candidly to us about their journey of entrepreneurship: having an initial idea, trying it out, making mistakes, trying something new, losing money, experimenting with an idea, abandoning an idea, and eventually — through a lot of trial and error — landing on something that works.
For example:
Uri Levine co-founded Waze, a traffic and navigation app acquired by Google for over $1.1 BN. In ThePowerMBA, he shares that his team needed to try out different ways of monetizing the product. They weren’t quite sure what would work and had to try a few different ways to get there.
Shazam is one of my all-time favourite apps. I love pointing it at the radio and instantly discovering the song that’s playing so I can add it to my playlists. But in ThePowerMBA, co-founder Chris Barton reveals that it took them literally years to learn how to monetize it. I actually counted nine separate strategies that they experimented with. And as the streaming market evolved, strategies that had been successful in the past had to be adapted so that their business model would survive.
Honestly, I love these stories.
I loved getting the inside scoop about these people’s process. And I’ve been reflecting on the fact that how success looks on the outside is often worlds apart from how it feels on the inside.
My own version of a graph that seems to be all over the internet. Original author unknown!
Most often, when we’re in the thick of it, we have no idea whether we even are succeeding. In fact, at the time, an idea that succeeds might feel exactly the same way to an idea that peters out.
(It’s worth stating the obvious: sometimes the idea doesn’t work out. There’s a reason so many founders have a few failures under their belts: you don’t get to succeed without failing. That’s why we need to be willing to create embarrassing work on the way to something great.)
And so I’ve been reflecting on the stories that we tell ourselves about success.
The myths that we buy into.
The expectations we have for ourselves.
When we ignore the twists and turns of real-life success stories, we do ourselves and our work a huge disservice.
And this isn’t just an abstract problem. In fact, it can have at least three very serious consequences in our lives:
1. We give up too soon.
When we expect that our success should look as fast and straightforward as our stories about others’ successes, we start getting impatient at how long it takes, and how much of the work is just a bit … dull.
We have grand dreams about what we can create, and imagine launching something with great fanfare only to find the response a bit anticlimactic. I speak from first-hand experience here: I once spent, literally, months agonising over the shape of a new programme I was creating: procrastinating, polishing it, changing the font on the website, and finally announcing it to the world with great trepidation. And what happened? Not one. single. person. signed up. (I learned the hard way: I didn’t do my homework. I didn’t test my idea enough before I decided to make it. That’s why I’ve drastically changed my approach, with much better results.)
When our expectations for success don’t include the slow and unsexy grind work behind the scenes, we don’t have the stamina or the vision to keep on experimenting. We don’t see the twists and turns as an essential part of the journey towards our long-term goals (the very parts that make us more resilient and wise). We don’t remind ourselves that everyone starts small; that everyone begins at the beginning.
2. We reduce our capacity for uncertainty.
I don’t often hear world-famous entrepreneurs talking openly about how exposed it can feel to go after a dream. But I hear it all the time from my clients. When we’re trying something out, experimenting in the public arena or with real-life customers, we can feel deeply exposed.
When we tell ourselves that our mentors simply went from strength to strength, we don’t allow space for vulnerability as part of the process. But when the founders of Shazam or Waze were in one of the squiggly bits of the graph above, I’ll bet they also felt exposed and uncertain.
Uncertainty is part and parcel of being creative. It may make us want to shut down or run away or panic, depending on how we’re wired. But when we can acknowledge our anxiety or discomfort around uncertainty, even ‘make friends’ with that discomfort and reframe it as adventure or excitement or potential, we can slowly expand our capacity to act in the face of the unknown.
And this, of course, expands our lives.
3. We think in terms of absolutes, not experiments.
This is something that the Strategyzer team communicates brilliantly. If you’re trying to work out whether an idea will succeed, what’s the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to conduct a small but robust experiment to find out? And then another experiment? And another?
For example:
If you want to design a 6-month personal development programme for working parents, could you run a two-hour beta workshop with six people in your living room next month?
If you want to create an app tackling food waste in student dorms, could you create a simple mock-up on a piece of paper, then interview 30 students to see how and if they’d use it?
If you want to launch a stationery brand featuring art by refugee children, could you order a trial run of 100 cards, market them to your community, and see which ones sell best?
This baby steps approach is exactly what I’m doing with my approach to my current group coaching programme. I’m running a series of prototypes in order to learn, iterate, and experiment with a new type of format for me. It’s not something I’ve seen many coaches do, but it’s an approach that we can all take, no matter our background.
Expecting ourselves to succeed right away, with the first iteration of our idea, puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on us. What if we could free up that energy? Just imagine what we’d learn, not just for our current idea but for all the ideas that follow.
Something to chew on: Next time you catch yourself telling yourself a story about what your success should look like, try reframing the story. How do you want to look back on this experience? From the perspective of your future self, what did you learn from this? And who did you become along the way?