Overnight Success

Humans are social animals. And it always feels good to get attention and focus from others. With the advent of social media, fame had become a means of survival. People have started craving the limelight. 

Tech startups are so hot nowadays. After moving to Silicon Valley, I received tons of questions about when I was going to have my own startup. I was astonished by the expectations and impressions that people have. I read about a few startups. And now I have an answer - it takes at least 3 years for building a technical product, another 2 years for getting enough clients so that you start earning enough to make a living and another 5 years to offer to the public and make millions. Is there anyone who is willing to dedicate 3 years to building the product? It's not easy. You need to believe in your idea for 3 years constantly even when you are making nothing out of it. Needless to mention the other life crisis that keeps coming like health crisis, family issues, mental illness, solitude, etc. What people really see is dollar bills falling from the sky after an overnight lottery of series A funding in which their startup was selected. Not everyone carries the luck of Mark Zuckerberg.

Social media is full of videos on investments nowadays. Everyone wants to grow their money - not knowing how. People are looking for hot stocks, cryptos, real estate, metaverses, racecourses, and whatnot! They don't want to wait for 10 years for their investments to flourish. They are simply seeking a wave ride that can double or triple their money overnight. I am a firm believer in working hard in exchange for the money that you can use to fulfill your desires. I would feel guilty to spend the easy money. I am not saying that making investments is a bad idea. But I believe that the money is not going to grow unless you work hard to make them grow. The money will never grow if you only invest in cryptos and spend only 2 hours at work and the rest of the time gossiping or checking your investments. Don't only invest. Make the money grow by doing serious, honest, and disciplined work at your workplace. I cannot explain the correlation, but, this is something that I believe in. When you work hard, you detach yourself from the results (i.e. the growth of your money). I believe that one gets what he is not attached to.

I have been practicing music for the last 7 years. I can vouch for the difficulty of the profession. It takes years of practice just to be able to sound in tune. Some random song gets famous someday and the musician receives overnight recognition. That no way means that there was no hard work involved. He received the recognition at an age of 40. He has spent 40 years of his life working towards music. Do you realize how long 40 years are to dedicate to something? Wake up every day and spend 8 hours of the day doing the same thing. That's what he has done all his life. He has nothing else. His success and recognition were long due. Not only music. Any work in the world requires a sheer amount of dedication and many many years of hard work for a small recognition. Writers spend over 10 years writing a single book. Movie directors take up to 5 years to write a screenplay and another 5 years to explain their vision to cinematographers, editors, music composers, actors, and set designers to finally get their film released which finally gets 2 hours of audience attention. It took 20 years of dedicated research and work to develop India's first missile - Prithvi. Several scientists and engineers were involved in the development under Dr. Abdul Kalam. Do you have the endurance to suffer years of failure?

I think the very idea of overnight success comes from how social media portrays it nowadays. People only like to see the result of the work and not the actual work that was done. Such shallow interpretation of the work often becomes a wrong source of inspiration for others when people start tending towards taking shortcuts to reach the goals as soon as possible instead of actually chewing the glass to spitfire.

PS: Can someone please hack into Elon Musk's Twitter account?