Don’t you just love a good overnight success story? It could involve the dumb luck of getting “discovered” by a talent agent while being featured on a Jumbotron at a football game (yes, I’m actually referencing Pamela Anderson here on my blog.) Or it might be like the recent story of the nurse whose TikTok video lead her to a new career. After her interior design transformation of her sister’s college dorm room went viral, she decided to leave nursing to become an interior designer.
No matter how it happens, when we look in from the outside, these huge leaps to success appear to be instantaneous.
I’d even compare it to winning the lottery. With lotteries, our success depends on luck, and we also have to buy the ticket to win. Overnight success is similar– there may be some luck, but you also have to enter the arena to get your chance.
Have you ever witnessed this overnight success and wished it could happen to you?
I have many times. I used to wish for this kind of miracle when I was unhappy in my dental practice. I couldn’t stand doing dentistry, but I also couldn’t imagine doing anything other than dentistry. You can see how this left me without options. Because I kept myself so stuck, I completely relinquished control over my present and my future.
Instead of being proactive, I constantly daydreamed that a patient would come into my office, tell me they have the perfect job for me, and rescue me from my misery.
This was the kind of overnight success I wanted. I thought if only I could have that good fortune on my side, then I could get my dream career too.
It never happened though. I stayed motionless for years, my only hope was for something spectacular to miraculously fall into my lap. It seemed I wasn’t as lucky as those charmed people were. What took them just a short time to change, took me years.
While it’s great to have dreams, we must take control of those dreams.
If you too are waiting for a lucky break to catalyze your change, it may take you as long as it took me to get unstuck. And I’m just going to say it because I care about you… you’re being a victim.
When we only wait for our lucky break to happen to us, we actually give up control over our lives. We dismiss the idea that we can create our own change, and we waste a lot of time waiting for someone or something else to rescue us. Giving up our power to create change transfers the power outside of ourselves. When we don’t feel in charge of our outcomes, that is being a victim to the circumstances around us.
This is why it’s important to be very clear about how overnight success actually happens.
When we think a lucky break is our only possible solution, we have no volition to take charge of what we really want in our lives. And we do nothing.
That is the double edged sword of overnight success. While I love to celebrate all wins including these, I think we need to be careful not to let it manipulate us into becoming victims to dumb luck.
Is overnight success even a real thing?
Take the nurse turned interior designer. Most likely, she didn’t just randomly design one room, post it, and then suddenly transform into a designer. It’s more likely that it’s something she dabbled in and studied and played with before she was discovered. in fact, she said, “I’m excited to follow a passion of mine that I’ve had since I was a young girl and get paid to do what I love.”
This is also the problem with social media. We miss the back story. If you looked at my social media for the first time today, you’d see someone who loves her career. You wouldn’t get to see the decade of victimhood, depression, and paralysis that I needed to wade through to get where I wanted. You would have missed the work that this once hopeless and confused person put in to create her own change. I often wonder if people who missed the decade of my struggles will think that my career change was luck.
Let me be clear. I’m not concerned about how they perceive me, but I care because of how they could perceive themselves.
Comparing ourselves to others can be the ultimate dream crusher.
We justify why we aren’t like others, why their solutions wouldn’t work for us. We see how we are different and therefore will have different results. We make a lot of excuses about how our differences make the dream impossible for us.
The truth is, we are all the same. No one is a unicorn, and everyone is a unicorn. While we all have our unique strengths and talents, everyone has worked to get what they want. (Okay, maybe not Pamela Anderson getting discovered on the Jumbotron, but you know what I mean.)
No matter how hard change can seem, we all are capable of creating it, and it rarely happens overnight.
As you evaluate the changes you want to make in your life, it’s great to look to others for inspiration but stop the comparison. When it looks like someone is living the dream, we never know the work they put into building their dream. Because we don’t get to see the work involved in getting somewhere, it’s easy to think that people reached their success easily.
If you wait for the lucky win to find you, you may very well be waiting forever. You might miss opportunities that are right in front of you.
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