Rebooting Your Brain

CHAPTER 15Myth: Success Happens Overnight

Speak with the vast majority of people, and what you will quickly discover is that they share a common, limiting perspective about how success happens. It is a belief that has been frequently perpetuated by newspapers, magazines, television, and, more recently, it runs rampant on social media. What all these purveyors of information, these pillars of wisdom, these distributors of knowledge lead us to believe is that when success comes it comes rapidly, virtually “overnight,” with little effort, with little resistance, and with little to no setbacks or obstacles.

Why is this perspective so dangerous? Because it conditions people to believe that if they try something and they're not instantaneously successful, there must be something wrong. Therefore, they should give up and quit far too soon.

In reality, success rarely if ever happens overnight. If you doubt this, just look at many of the greatest inventions, startups of iconic multibillion‐dollar companies, and launching points of incredible careers. When you really do the research, you'll be hard‐pressed to find a single example of a true overnight success.

It took Thomas Edison many years and more than 10,000 experiments before he was able to make the first commercially viable light bulb glow for more than a few hours. In 1878, he would use his invention to start the Edison Electric Light Company, an organization that is today known as General Electric.

It took Marie Curie more than ...