What it takes to be an Overnight Success

I’ll be honest here; I struggle big time to turn my creative ideas (that feels like Gold dust in my head) into finished publishable work. And while I have to agonize over dots and commas, there is a special breed of content creators who seems to have an innate ability to churn out a month’s worth of content without breaking a sweat.

Let me give a few examples of such quality content churning machines (Legends).

1. Brian Clark, founder of ‘Copyblogger’ — Our man churns out ‘1000 words’ essays as if they were tweets. I heard him say on a podcast that he has written a couple of long-form articles (1000 words +) each week since 2005. If you do the math, you’ll realize that Brian could get a book of 50K words done in half a year. And that while he is working on his business, podcast, training etc.
2. Then there is Mr Dan Sullivan, the founder of the strategic coach. I like to call him a book-writing machine cause the last time I checked on Amazon, and he had 40 books listed under his name. If I reference the 50K book calculation from the previous paragraph (6 months for a book), that is approximately 20 years of book writing. All this while running one of the most successful strategic coaching programs for 20+ years.
3. Another classic example would be the Perennial Marketeer’ Seth Godin’, author of nineteen bestsellers. He has been writing and publishing content on his blog every single day for more than a decade. That’s 3650+ posts in as many days while running the altMBA course, writing books (19 of them) and producing one of the highest quality podcasts out there, ‘Akimbo’. Along with a million other things.
4. And this list wouldn’t be complete without the Maestro’ James Altucher’. His Bio goes like this “hedge-fund manager, author, podcaster and entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded over 20 companies. He has published 20 books and contributes to publications including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post.” Are you kidding me? Does this guy even sleep? Btw, his podcast is one of my secret weapons (highly recommended).

I could go on all day long with a list of creators, but you get the drift.

At this point, you might be wondering where is Amjad going with this? So without stretching it further let me explain!

Whenever I saw these super productive content creators, I wondered, are they gifted, or could I be as good as them? Should the rest of us mere mortals even bother competing with them? How the hell are these people creating all this content effortlessly while I am in a constant struggle? And what could I do to become one of them?

These questions troubled me for a while, and then I met Ahmed, the YouTuber. He may not be in the same league as the legends I mentioned above but is quite successful on the Youtube platform. He is a nifty content creator and produces a couple of 8–10 minute videos sharing cooking recipes every week. Over time he’s built a decent tribe/audience that is now a captive audience for his content. Today the channel has a decent number of subscribers with almost 100K+ views to any video he publishes. He produces an episode a week and put it out there, and the high viewership guarantees a decent flow on income. In retrospect, even Ahmed looks like an effortless content creator.

But wait a minute, is it that effortless to create his videos? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Every week, he plans recipes, buys the ingredients, cooks the food, and records the whole thing on camera. If there were mistakes, then he has to cook the food all over again. Once the recording is complete, he has to edit the video, record the voice over, finalize it, and publish it on the YouTube channel. And then the marketing begins.

Phew, Effortless, right?

Now, you might be thinking — OK! It looks like some work, but he’s getting paid for it big time and has 100K views/video to motivate him. And I understand that it’s easy for him to get excited with his growing fan base. But what do you think kept him motivated when he had just started. It took him almost a year to get to the first 500 subscribers and then another year before the channel got its 5000th subscriber. And mind you, there was hardly any revenue generated, so the money to create those first few hundred videos were all spent from the pocket. In short, his overnight success was four years in the making!

When Ahmed started creating these videos, it used to take him almost 5–6 days to complete one video. Now, Ahmed can get a whole video done in less than a day. The man persevered and lo and behold he finally became a “Content Machine” churning out videos at will.

In hindsight, what he did looks like the smart choice, but it took a special effort to keep pushing forward when there was no guarantee of success. So many people didn’t believe that this would work, but he wouldn’t deter from his path.

It takes a particular person to know what they want and then not give up on the dreams, no matter the price.

There are so many talented people like Ahmed building their niche and their tribes one day at a time. What makes them unique is their approach & mindset. They know what they want to achieve, and then they go all in no matter how long it takes. It’s evident from the story I shared that success in most cases doesn’t happen overnight. Dan, Seth, Brian or Ahmed are all putting their hand up every single day for years. They have shown the discipline to do the hard work and hence are reaping the rewards.

As I write these words, I remember a Picasso story I heard a long time back. Once, the Maestro was having lunch in a restaurant, and a lady sitting nearby who was an admirer of his work approached him to say hello. She asked whether Picasso would be kind enough to draw something for her. The artist did a quick sketch on a napkin and gave it to the lady, who thanked him profusely for the nice gesture. As she was about to take his leave, Picasso stopped her and asked for $10,000 for the sketch. The lady was shocked and couldn’t believe her ears.

She exclaimed, “But that only took you five minutes!”

Picasso took the napkin back from the lady and said, “No, dear lady, that took me a lifetime.

Kudos!! To all the people who are putting in the effort every single day sharpening their skill. None of them can guarantee success, but this is not a zero-sum game, and there is always something to learn/ gain from the experience of creating any form of content.

So, my friend, the secret to great content creation is that “There is no shortcut to success”. Overnight success is a myth. We have to remember that success is the perfect black swan. It’s never predictable when looking ahead but obvious when you reflect. So the most logical thing to do is trust the instincts, put the head down and get working on our ideas.

And, I suggest the sooner we all start, the better.