The Truth About Overnight Success

The first thing I think about when I think about success is this is, what does success mean to you? You know, when we're younger, when I was younger specifically, success was only viewed through money. How much money I make, all of that type of stuff. Now, when I see a successful person has nothing to do with how much money they make, I would say more than anything else, my definition of success is how free somebody is and how happy they are and how much joy and peace they have in their life. I know people that are worth billions of dollars, that are stressed out every single day. I know people who are just getting by and paying their bills, and they're the most joyful, peaceful, happy people I know. I would not say that the billionaire is more successful than those people who have ultimate peace in their life. And so more than anything else, what does it mean for you is what's important to think about when you look at success? A lot of people are like, I want to be successful. Well, what does that mean to you? That's the first thing that I think that you really need to figure out. The second thing I'll tell you is this is. Success is not really a destination. It is more of a journey. It is more of something that you decide to work on for a while. The way I like to think about is like the story of the Chinese bamboo. If you're unfamiliar with the story of the Chinese bamboo, the older I get, the more I realize that the story of the Chinese bamboo is so true. It's so much how life is. It's so much how, quote, unquote, success is. The story of the Chinese bamboo is that you plant the bamboo seed and you put it in the ground and you water it, you give it sunlight, you get everything it needs. First year doesn't even pop out of the ground. Second year, you water, you give it sunlight, give it everything it needs. Second year doesn't pop out of the ground. Third year, fourth year, fifth year, none of those years, it pops out of the ground. And then the sixth year, it's the craziest thing. It grows up to 60ft. I'm sorry, it grows up to 80ft in six weeks. It just explodes. And so we've all heard of the phrase of like, an overnight success. Oh, they were an overnight success. But really, most of the time, when someone's an overnight success, you don't see their 10 years of hard work and dedication and grueling practice to get them to have that overnight success. When you see someone who's like a breakout actor and they start to win all of the awards. Everyone's like, they came out of nowhere. Well, they were working and grueling and barely getting by for so long before you ever found out who this person was. And so we live in a world of instant gratification, you know, like, we are so trained to think that what we want we can get immediately. Like if I want, if I get hungry and I want groceries to my house, like the other day I decided, you know what? I would like some. This is a true story. Two weeks ago, I was like, you know what? I want to start making some fresh squeezed orange juice. Lauren and I are at a cafe. We got fresh squeezed orange juice. It was really good. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to go on Amazon. I'm going to get a juicer. Just a one, you know, it's like $30. Just an orange juice juicer, an electric one. And I'm going to see if I can get it delivered to the house. I'm thinking it'll be here in a couple days, as typical with Amazon. And it was like, it'll be there in three hours. And we got home, we went and did a couple errands. We got home, it was a Saturday. It was already at my house. And then I was like, this is crazy, it's already here. I wasn't even expect to be here so quick. I was like, we need to order some oranges. So we order oranges from. It was like five pounds of oranges. We ended up ordering from Whole Foods. And it was at our house that night and I was making orange juice that day. I didn't have to. I was already. Had already left my house, but I didn't have to leave my house to get the juicer. I didn't have to leave my house to get the orange juice. We're so trained to think that everything happens immediately. I want a juicer. I can have a juicer immediately. I want orange juice. I'm going to get oranges delivered to my house. I want, you know, someone to come. I want to be at the airport. Oh, I want someone to come pick me up right now. I'll just get an Uber sent to my house. I'm hungry. I'm going to get some sort of food delivery sent to my house and we can get everything that we want almost immediately. Right? Do you remember when movies used to come out or you wanted to see a movie, you wanted to rent a movie, you'd have to get in your car, you'd have to go to Blockbuster. You'd have to hope that Blockbuster had your movie that you wanted to see. Sometimes you get there and realize that somebody had rented it out and then you couldn't watch the movie and had to wait three or four days for them to get it in. And they call you until your movie's finally in and then you could go pick it up. Now it's like, hey, I want to watch any movie. I can go to Amazon. I can go to YouTube on my phone. I can literally pay $4 for it. I can watch the movie immediately. So we are so trained with how great technology is nowadays and how convenient our lives have become that when we want something, we immediately get it. But life, success, happiness, joy, everything that's great in this world takes time. And we have to understand that there is a retraining of ourselves that we kind of have to do. You know, like, you would never think that you could go to the gym one time and you would wake up the next morning and you would have a six pack. It'd be crazy, right? You know that it takes time and. And dedicated effort to get in the shape that you want. You can't just go one time and you have it right. You can't eat one salad and lose the weight that you want to. You can't save $20 and wake up and be financially free the next day. Right? You can't work 10 hours today and just be a millionaire. We all know that. But for some reason we have this feeling of, why am I not there yet? I deserve to be there. I should be there. I've been working so hard in my business for three months. Why am I not successful yet? Because great things take time. You can't work out once and be fit. You can't save $20 and be financially free. You can't work one really hard day and be ultra successful. But if you do it every day for five years, different world. If you work out every day for five years, different body. If you save $20 every day for the next five years, you put it into a good investment account and you just leave it for the rest of your life. Different financial freedom. You work 10 hours a day or eight hours a day every day for five years or Monday through Friday, and you don't distract yourself. Let's say you just do eight hours, nine hours a day, Monday through Friday in your business from scratch, and you don't have any distraction. You're not on Instagram, you're not doing other things. You're not cleaning up around the house. But you're fully dedicated in your business five years from today. Different life. Great things take time. I had one time, I was at an event, and a lady came up to me, and she's like, rob, I listened to your podcast, and I love it. I just started a podcast. How do I get my podcast to millions of downloads a month? And I was like, can I be honest with you? And she's like, yeah. And I was like, do three episodes a week for eight years, and I guarantee you'll figure it out. And she's like, well, what's like, the shortcut? And I was like, there is no shortcut. That's the thing, is you just have to put the work in. And it's not me trying to flex on a lady or trying to, you know, disregard her question, but really what people are always looking for is, like, tips and tricks and how do I get to shortcuts? There is no shortcut for hard work. There aren't shortcuts for some of the greatest things in life. Like, when I look back at my podcast, my very first day of having a podcast, I put out three episodes the very first day, and I got 44 downloads. So if you divide 44 by three, I basically had 15 people listen on day one. And then the podcast grew, and it grew, and I kept putting in work, and I didn't make any money off the podcast for four and a half, five years. And I just kept doing it because it was just a passion. Just. I love this. I don't know if there's anything else I've loved more in my entire life than doing this thing and putting this message out and helping people. And it started growing because I was passionate about it. I wanted to put time into it. You know, the podcast. I'll give you numbers. Most podcasters don't give numbers. I don't know why. It's crazy. But, you know, literally, it was like. It grew, it grew, it grew. And then within the first year, it got to about 80,000 downloads a month. And it stayed there. This is what's crazy. It grew to 80,000 downloads a month, and it stayed there for three years. I could not break past 80, 85,000 downloads a month. But I just kept putting it out. I was like, I'm just gonna keep putting it out. I'm just gonna keep trying to help people, all of this stuff. And then something happened, and it was like the Chinese bamboo and the podcast, like, 10 x'd, 15 x'd in one year. And it just exploded. And it was like the hockey stick, where it's like. It's kind of growing just a teeny, tiny bit. And then it was just a hockey stick moment, but it took five years to get to that hockey stick moment. And then, you know, now the podcast is, you know, 7x that. And it's just because of the fact that I think it takes time for great things to happen. It's almost like the universe, God, whatever you believe in, knows how long it's gonna take and how much effort is needed for you to get to where you wanna go, and you wanna be there sooner. But you just have to trust I'm heading in the right direction. Eventually I'm gonna get to where I wanna go. It took me four years to get to 4 million downloads in the podcast, and now he does it in less than 30 days. And it's just a crazy thing to think about that it's gotten there and it's grown to what it is. But once again, I'm not saying it to flex or anything. I'm saying it because it took so much time. It took so much effort. It took so many hours and hours and hours of trying to get better at it. And if you just don't stop, you cannot fail at anything, because eventually you figure it out. But most people don't give themself a long enough Runway. They don't. They say, oh, I'm gonna try this out for six months, and then if it doesn't work, I'm gonna try something else out. And they're bouncing from one thing to another to another to another six months, and they never fully get the chance to be a master at something. What you've got to do is you've got to ask yourself, what's something that I love so much or that I'm so passionate about or that I want to get better at that I'm okay dedicating the next two or three years of my life. Two to three years of my life, like, really trying to figure out what it is that I want to do. And I can think about many instances where this happened in my life where there was a hockey stick moment. My income was the exact same thing when I was first growing my business. It took time. It took time. It took time, and it took about four years before there was a huge hockey stick moment where it just exploded. The reason why I love life is because. And I love the idea of trying to master something is because as humans, we can master anything that we want to. We just have to be able to make the decision of the thing that we want to master and we have to dedicate ourselves to it. And I think too few people in this world want to dedicate themselves to something. But if you just decide that you're not going to stop, you can never lose. It might take you longer than it took someone else, but eventually you're going to get there. And I always use the example. It's like, very simple. I live in Austin, Texas, and, you know, if I want to get to Dallas, Dallas is north of Austin. And it doesn't matter how I decide to get there. I could walk, I could crawl, I could take a bike, I could take a car, I could hop in a plane. As long as I'm traveling north, eventually I'm going to end up in Dallas. So for some people, success, you might see other people and their quote, unquote success might be as fast as taking a plane. They get to Dallas very quickly and they seem like they're beating you and they seem like they're quote, unquote, better than you. For you, it might be like walking to Dallas, but you're heading in the right direction. As long as you don't give up, you cannot fail. When people want to grow a business and they say, I'm going to give myself six months, I know very few businesses that are successful in six months. If you say, I'm going to give myself three years and I'm not going to sway, I'm not going to give up, I'm not going to have a plan B, I'm going to put 100% of my working effort when I decide that I'm working into that. So If I work 9 to 5 in my business, 100% of my focused effort goes into that. Give yourself a couple years. It's night and day difference. And usually, and I've seen it over and over and over again in my life in many different ways, and friends life in many different ways. Usually you hit a hockey stick moment where everything explodes and it goes way better than you ever possibly imagined. Like, when I look at the podcast, I never, ever thought it would hit 300 million downloads. I never, I could have thought that I would have been doing it for 30 years and still not hit 300 million downloads, but it did. And it's only gotten there because I think of just the dedicated effort I put into it, of wanting to get better and wanting to work on myself and just passionately wanting to help people. And so if you want to be successful, whatever success means to you, what does it require, what time, what do you need to learn how? Do you need to figure out how to do it? You know, most people start, they get excited, and then they stop. If you just don't stop, you can't lose. And I remember seeing this before. I was watching a video, there's an interview with Jared Leto, and I've said this before on the podcast, but Jared Leto's, you know, an extremely successful musician. He's also an extremely successful actor. Like the highest of the highest of both. He goes, when he goes as a musician, they sell out stadiums. He won, has won Academy awards for the best actor for movies that he's been in. So he's like hit the top of the top in two separate categories that most people never even get to. I remember watching this video from him about 10 years ago, and he was being interviewed and a lady was asking him, and she said, what do you think the secret to your success is? And he said, I realize that most people just don't start. And as long as I'm start, as long as I start, I'm already light years ahead of everybody else. And then if I just don't stop, I'm going to beat everybody else who gives out, everybody else who gives up. You're just going to be passed. And so, like, I love the idea of mastery as a human because we can learn anything that we want to as long as we put effort in towards it. And I have a tattoo on my wrist for those of you guys that are on video. You can see it, and it's a roman numeral of 10,000. The Roman numeral for 10,000. It's an X with a line above it. Because I truly believe in the 10,000 hour rule, which is it takes 10,000 hours at least of dedicated practice to master something, to become a master at something. But the problem is most people want to try to get to mastery in a hundred hours, and that's just not going to happen. And so when you look at your goals, your goals really only take three things. They take direction, they take action, they take time. Direction. Am I heading in the right direction to get me to where I want to go? The eventual destination that I'm working towards, that's something that I control. The direction that I'm heading in. Number two is action. Am I taking the right actions to eventually get me to where I want to go as well? Yes, that's something that I control. Time. That's the secret. You can't control that. It's like the Chinese bamboo. It takes the time that it's going to take. That's something that once again, God, the universe, life, whatever it is that you believe in, is in control of. We cannot control the time. We can only control the direction and the actions that we're taking. It's kind of like the example I always love to give is, imagine if you're a husband, your wife is pregnant, and you go up to her and you're like, hey, honey, listen, I know this. I know this pregnancy thing. It's supposed to take about nine months. I would really like to get a vacation by the end of the year. Do you think that maybe you could hurry it up? Like, can you speed this thing up? Maybe we can. Can you get done in, like, five months so we can take a vacation by the end of the year? Your wife would think that you were insane. Why? Because pregnancy, creating a child takes about nine months. That's what the universe has decided. Your success. You don't know how long it takes. The only thing that you can do is control what you can control, which is the direction that you're heading and the actions that you're taking. And just like the Chinese bamboo, the Chinese bamboo takes six years before it finally comes out of the ground. But when it comes out of the ground, it grows 80ft in six weeks. Your success, the thing that you're working for, is exactly the same. It will take longer than you probably want it to, but. But when it happens, it will be so much greater than you could possibly imagine. So figure out where you're going, take the right actions, head in the right direction, and then just don't stop. And that is how you create a life that's successful. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. Based off of what you watch, YouTube thinks that you should be clicking this video and watching this one next. 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