The Two Golden Rules of Success
This article is a part of the November 2018 issue of Transcendence Magazine. Click here to download the full magazine for free!
Today if you want an audience as an artist, you need to have an online presence. Being online has become more of a necessity now, and no matter how much you loathe online platforms and social media, you have to do something; otherwise, your audience will mostly be limited.
Starting out as an online creator would be a very difficult task for most of us, a majority of the people fail again and again (of course, learning something new each time), but still don’t reach the peak of online success. If you are in this group, don’t worry, that’s the norm here.
We always look up to people like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk, who have a massive following online and have influenced millions. But wait. None of them succeeded overnight. In the beginning, they started just like us. Failing again and again, learning new things each time and slowly ascending towards the peak of success.
Let’s first take the case of Seth Godin. One thing he is extremely famous for is the huge range of books he has written on marketing and self-help, thirteen of which are New York Times Bestsellers.
Most people just see this ‘being-a-bestseller’ part of Seth Godin and not the part of how he got started. In fact, he received more than nine hundred rejection letters from various publishers for the manuscript of his second book (That’s more rejection letters than any of us, I’m sure.). But he still kept going. He still kept sending the manuscript to publishers. Every time he got a rejection he made some improvements to the manuscript and tried again. And finally, he got that book published, and the next one, and the one after that. And he had continued writing and publishing bestsellers ever since.
“The best way out is always through.”
– Robert Frost
Now, Gary Vaynerchuck. Most of us see Gary as a prolific hustler who is always filled up with lots of energy. And most of us see hustlers — in general — as the sort of impatient people, who get mad if they didn’t complete a week’s work in a single day. Some of these conceptions are true, but not all of them. In the case of Gary Vaynerchuck, he wasn’t always the person we see now. Before VaynerNation and VaynerMedia, Gary helped his father with their family’s wine business and he created a YouTube channel called WineLibrary to promote their products. At WineLibrary, he created daily episodes, much like a vlog, in which he tasted different wines for the audience.
This wasn’t an overnight success.
For hundreds of episodes, he tasted wines apparently for no one. And only slowly, after many months, did a dedicated following started to bloom over it. Finally, when he quit WineLibrary to start VaynerMedia, he had done a thousand (Yes, a THOUSAND!) episodes of wine tasting and had gathered thousands of followers.
So, what’s the takeaway from these stories?
If you haven’t figured that out yet, I’ll fetch it out for you: it is the importance of persistence and patience.
No matter what you do, you have to do it regularly. You should not just come out one day with full energy and vanish into the blue the next day. You must be persistent and regular with what you do. And neither should you hope for an overnight success or an over-week success or even an over-month success, these things — like building a dedicated online following — always tend to take time to work out (around a few years for most people). So be patient.
Persistence and patience are the two golden rules of success for creators. You should follow both. They are like the keys that open up the gates towards the peak of success. You need to open the gates first and then — and only then — can you start climbing towards the top.
So, keep creating your art. And instead of focusing on creating breakthrough wins and shortcuts that really don’t exist, focus on building a body of work.
This article first appeared on the Transcendence Magazine:
