The Cruelty of “Overnight Success”

Everyone Wants the Breakout. Nobody Wants the Decade.

I’ve always been suspicious of the phrase “overnight success.” It’s too slick, too convenient. It’s designed to hide the years of drudgery that came before, and to endow whoever is lucky enough to have become the flavour of the month with the inevitability of a messiah.

The reality: most so-called overnight successes are ten-year slogs, punctuated by humiliations and failures that nobody wants to put on the book jacket. We love // obsess over speed, we romanticize the viral clip, the sudden breakout, the startup that rockets from garage to IPO in the time it takes the rest of us to muddle through another season of life. But these are, for the most part, fictions.

When I was younger, I wanted to believe in the miracle of acceleration. I wanted to think that if I was sharp enough, talented enough, lucky enough, my life could change in an instant. And who doesn’t want that? To bypass the “long apprenticeship” and leap straight to mastery?

The magazines put the young founder on the cover. The podcasts book the wunderkind who seems to have hacked the system. And the rest of us are left wondering what invisible ingredient we’re missing while we push our own boulder up the hill.