Fortune Favors the Consistent
This past summer, I spent a week in the company of likeminded young individuals at a FEE seminar in New Hampshire. One of the speakers also happened to be one of my favorite writers: T.K. Coleman. During a talk, he mentioned his habit of blogging every day for over two years, even though for the first year, only his dad read his blog.
Fortune favors the bold, but it also favors the consistent. I had only started reading his work after it had permeated my social circles. It was surprising to hear he had once had few readers when everything I saw him publish was so good. I shouldn’t have been too surprised—everyone starts from the bottom. And we’re inundated with stories of creatives languishing in obscurity for years before their big break.
Ezra Klein (founder and editor-in-chief of Vox) and his team reach 100 million readers a month. But it didn’t begin that way. He recently discussed his start to blogging on the Tim Ferriss Show (around the 23:10 mark):
“I wasn’t writing for a big audience; I had, by 2004, let’s say… I was getting, I think, 35 readers a day… And I think that I cared more about those 35 readers a day than I have ever cared… it blew me away.”
For his first few years, he wrote up to fifteen times a day.
For those who don’t create, we imagine fame comes immediately the moment we start creating. The reality is much different. There is both a process of competency and a process of discovery that take time. An audience doesn’t spontaneously develop overnight. The quality of work that makes you worthy of an audience doesn’t, either.
T.K. and Ezra didn’t stop in the beginning. To them, the daily practice mattered much more than recognition.
Maybe T.K. and Ezra’s first observations weren’t as keen as the ones they publish now. Maybe their writing wasn’t as polished. But they gave themselves the gift of momentum. They turned the act of writing into a habit, without the expectation of external reinforcement.
“Fortune favors the consistent” may even be the wrong phrase. Through consistency, you generate your own fortune.
