Actress Jenna Fischer said in an interview that she auditioned for the same casting director for many years before landing the role of Pam on The Office at the age of 29. Prior to this, she endured six years of “small successes, followed by heaps of rejection,” while living paycheck to paycheck in dingy apartments. She wrote a book all about her eventual success that she joked could have been titled ‘Struggle, Struggle, Cry, Think-You-Should-Give-Up, Work, Repeat.
The founder of Pandora, Tim Westergren, was turned down for financing more than 300 times before finally getting one yes from an investor. He was told no MORE THAN 300 TIMES before someone believed in his idea and was able to start Pandora.
These examples exemplify how when you’re pursuing something in life, you can be told no hundreds of times before hearing yes. You can fail over and over again until one day you don’t. These examples also show how hundreds of smart, successful people in power positions can make the wrong call. But most importantly, these examples show that it takes a lot of persistence and patience to succeed.
Many of us have forgotten the virtue of patience. But this isn’t our fault. We are surrounded by people who’ve seemed to streamline success, fame, and fortune. Understandably when you’re pursuing a goal, seeing others succeed, and somewhat “easily” can leave us feeling like things should happen quickly and easily, and if they don’t, maybe we should stop pursuing them at all. Here’s the big secret about overnight success, it’s bullshit. The media tends to falsely exemplify years of hard work as overnight success stories. Yes, there are some people whos successes have been owned more to fortuity than hard work..like the “catch me ousside how bout dah” girl from the Dr. Phil show…but most “overnight success” stories are not really successes at all, at least not meaningful success. For most of us, harboring any type of meaningful success takes years of hard work and patience.
Almost everything in nature moves at a very slow pace and takes time. Evolution changes so slowly we don’t even notice the changes until one day humans won’t have wisdom teeth or an appendix anymore (cause come on, really, we don’t either of them.)
When a relationship ends its painful waiting to “get over it,” but as much partying, traveling, or ice cream and Netflix binging you do, when it comes down to it, time and patience are really all that will work.
Like most things in life, we can’t choose how quickly our goals happen…all we can do is work very hard, be very patient, and not believe the hype. People have started to make money off of others impatience. Online “consultants” promise people who want to start their own business, become a writer or work from home that they will reveal the steps to change their life in a matter of months so they can travel the world and work from their bed while drinking Pina Coladas. These people are selling the lifestyle, not the business. That’s because they know most people are chasing the lifestyle that comes with success, rather than the success itself. And let’s be honest if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.
That is the problem with impatience…being impatient stops us from taking the time to think about what we really want to pursue in life and dedicating the time and effort necessary. This leads to so many people prematurely giving up or believing they have failed when in fact they are just getting started.
Patience is paramount – the only way to A. Figure out what you want to do. and B. Become successful at it, is to try many things, fail many times, and keep working and making progress until one day you wake up and realize, you did it.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on Google in 1996. By 1999 still, only few people had even heard of Google. After 8 years of perseverance, Google finally made it, going public in 2004. Now Google is the leading search engine in the world. The word Google has even become a verb. If you don’t believe me, google it.
The Game of Thrones creator Martin has won a dozen Emmys but he didn’t just decide to write a script and gain success overnight. Most people would have never heard of him before Game of Thrones was noticed and picked up by HBO…but Martin had been writing and pitching for decades, 25 years to be exact.
We see these successful people and assume it was easy for them, they had an “in”, or they got lucky. And with social media portraying an easy carefree lifestyle and consultants telling you how easy it is to gain success, it’s no wonder so many of us believe that it should be and can be easy.
Well, the fact is, most success doesn’t happen overnight. Most successful people, companies, and brands were built over many years by people who dedicated a substantial amount of their time and energy into their work. They faced challenges, rejection, skepticism, and likely failed multiple times. The one thing they all had in common? Patience.
So why is it so difficult to put less focus on the finish line and more focus on patience? When we work at a job, a dream, a relationship or whatever it may be for long enough our identity gets intertwined with this pursuit. Once we dedicate ourselves to something for long enough it’s very difficult to remove our identity from that and “start over” if starting over turns out to suit us best. People don’t want to risk failure. That’s part of the reason many people are afraid to really delve into something and give it their all…for years and years. Instead, they hope things will happen quickly and when it doesn’t they give up before they have really committed themselves too deeply.
That’s why many people seek and want to believe in overnight success. That’s why so many people pay ridiculous amounts of money to people who run cheesy Facebook ads promising that if you copy what they did your life will change overnight, too.
No matter what you’re pursuing, everything in life worth doing takes time. During any life transition, we will feel varying emotions. Lost, scared, annoyed, worried, excited, and usually, impatient. Very impatient.
So why am I telling you all of this? There have been times in my life when I was working towards a goal or experiencing a major life transition and I longed for my past self as I awaited this future self I had so patiently been working on…there have been times I’ve failed, but I learned that failure is a good thing, dare I say great thing. Failure teaches us what is working and what is not, and forces us to work harder.
Don’t get me wrong, this article isn’t for everyone because delusion is a real thing people, and yes there are plenty of people that need to give up. Like the guy whose dream was to design and construct grizzly bear-proof armor after he was attacked by a bear while hiking…and came up with the brilliant idea to spend the next seven years and over $150,000 constructing this armor only to go broke, realize there may not be an industry for such things, and try to sell the thing on eBay.
Spoiler alert: no one was rich enough or dumb enough to buy it. While I do feel bad that we was attacked by a bear (I mean, holy shit! It’s a f*ing bear)…we all know that person who needs a wake-up call, but luckily for you, he’s not the type of person I’m referring to. I’m referring to people like you, with great goals, great ambition…and maybe just a little impatience. In life, all we can really do is try things we have interest in pursuing, work towards goals, fail and try again…and most importantly accept that things will take time. And sometimes that time sucks.
If we continue thinking things should progress quickly or we choose to give up altogether we will never reach happiness or success. Success should be defined by progress. And progress takes patience. The “good life” (whatever that means to you) doesn’t happen overnight. Expect and embrace a long, challenging journey. I promise you it will be worth it.
