Over Night Success

Over night success. That’s fun to think about right? Really enjoyable to imagine that the calvary rides in BEFORE the battle even starts; saving you the snag nails and stumped toes. But that’s not how this works. 

Over night successes usually take years of planning, plotting, early mornings, late nights, and of course the old blood sweat and tears. I didn’t believe this early on. More accurately, I didn’t want to believe this. I wanted to believe in a path that was paved, had great smelling flowers on the side of it, and maybe one of those flat escalators you see at airports. Instead what I have walked through these past 10 years has looked more like a muddy ditch with snakes. To quickly come full circle with this and alleviate doom and gloom talk, I kind of started to enjoy the ditch haha! 

For me, waiting for my over night success was a form of procrastinating the hard work. Pushing back all of those heavy lifting activities that lead to real, true, and sustainable growth. I think that’s because the hope of rescue around the corner, or my “lucky break”, made me take my foot off of the gas so many times. 

An interesting anecdote that might help explain this. If you know me well, you know I love talking about entrepreneurship as much as music. In business, the equivalent of getting signed on a label is a buy-out. A bigger company swoops in and pays top dollar to the founder and his team for their genius idea. One thing I’ve observed about successful buy-outs, is that the businesses being acquired don’t really stop working. They continue with diligence like the purchase had never even happened. Hold tight as I come full circle with your music. The surprising truth, the hard work continues through and after the acquisition. 

Have you thought about that? If you did get picked up by a label, by a manager, that work doesn’t stop. It just throws fuel on the fire so you can move at an accelerated pace. Instead, on the other side, we often think that getting signed (getting help) will lead to sipping mojitos and waking up around 3pm. No way! It’s gonna be more work, you’re just gonna have help. 

I know that I may sound a bit redundant at this point, but I just want you guys to see that the idea of an overnight success is bogus. It just doesn’t even exist. Your over night success is gonna be just like the successes of all those who came before you; A lot of freaking work! It will just seem like it’s over night to everyone else because they weren’t there for all of those 1000’s of "over nights" where you were toiling away making your dream happen.