Overnight Success: What Does It Really Look Like?

I’ve traveled a lot this year to conferences and mastermind meetings, and I’ve met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot of amazing things. It’s been a transformative year in many ways, and I’ve recently received compliments on my “overnight success.”

Tip: If you ever want to see an otherwise articulate entrepreneur speechless, just compliment them on their overnight success.  

I’m not a strict constructionist, but to me, “overnight” has a meaning that simply isn’t congruent with success. Whether “success” is defined as having achieved a comfortable financial level and a certain amount of visibility and standing in a chosen field or publication by a prestigious publisher, success isn’t something that happens overnight.

What does success look like? 

• Success begins long before others wake up.
• Success begins with a dream, a plan, a strategy, and concrete goals.
• Success is built on a strong foundation of learning, growing, sharing, and giving.
• Success is starting, stumbling, stopping, and starting once again.
• Success doesn’t always depend on spectacular leaps, but upon the day-in, day-out doing of little things, and the readiness to make that spectacular leap when the opportunity arises.
• True success looks far ahead and does the thing that will matter in twenty years, rather than in twenty minutes, or twenty days.

The kind of success I’m interested in is the success that achieves balance between personal vision and professional mission. This sometimes means that visible overnight success takes longer to arrive, but when it does, it’s congruent with my deepest values. It’s that authentic, creative, and abundant vision that makes the journey worthwhile, and builds the kind of success I believe in.