The One Thing You Have To Do To Be Successful
I apologise for the clickbait-y headline in advance.
I have a friend.
I call her Australia and she’s one of the kindest, most broken human beings I know. Those two traits are usually found together in the wild.
We’ve recently started talking again after a year of not speaking to each other. She’s changed though.
I am not sure where she found this new strength she’s swinging around like a self-confidence flail, but it’s there and I love it. She decided to finally set up her photography business, take it online, and make something out of it.
Like many of us with a potentially marketable skill, she has tried before. Buying a domain name. Setting up a WordPress site. Giving it a half-assed try for a week before deciding nobody’s reading/listening/buying and heading back to that one thing we’re all seasoned pros at: wallowing in self-pity.
Yesterday, she hits me with this:
And that got me thinking about success. So I sent back this:
And here we are.
The Secret To Success
Hard. Work.
There are no shortcuts, no magic pills, no secret sauces. You have to put in the work.
Someone somewhere wants to buy what you’re selling. But if you don’t put in the Hard Work™ then they’ll never find your shop to begin with.
I wish I had been smart enough when I was younger to understand this. For years I’ve been looking for the “Secret to Success” as if it was a treasure map hidden in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
I never found that map, cause it wasn’t a map. It was a big neon sign at the entrance of my dad’s Andean tunnel base camp. It was printed in big bold letters on the cover of my grandfather’s autobiographical book. It was in the background painting of one of my best friend’s animation reel.
Hard Work, they screamed.
And I looked at all those signs and went “Naaah. There’s gotta be an easier way to do this”.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much there isn’t.
Without Hard Work, success is fleeting. A flash in the pan. Just ask the Jersey Shore kids.
Elements of Hard Work
Putting in the time to be successful (like my friend the kangaroo humper) is only part of the equation.
She found her fuel somewhere. The thing to propel her forward. Hard Work is now coming naturally to her. But she’s also doing something else without realising it. Not only does she work hard, she’s also working smart.
The webinar she signed up for is an online marketing coaching session. She noticed putting down money on random ads, no matter how localised they are, was not netting her many clients.
So she decided to train for it.
Element 1: Improvement and self-actualisation.
Between making sure her kids don’t die, and the dog gets walked, she’s working on her site. Tweaking things here and there, adding header images to her invoices, showing off her latest pictures.
She published that site though. It’s no longer “Under Construction” even though it always sort of will be. She can’t stop poking at it. But she published it.
Some of the most intelligent, skilled, interesting people I know never got their idea off the ground cause they stopped halfway. Often discouraged by the fact that it wasn’t looking perfect and it was taking too long to get there.
Element 2: Done is better than perfect.
I don’t know how much Australia believes in her skills, her work, or her art. But at this point, I don’t think it really matters. She’s never exactly been the most self-confident person in the world.
But to see her put in the work on her site, her online presence, and her image, you would never know that.
The webinar idea is interesting because it gives a sense that she noticed something wasn’t working and decided to pivot. Her ads weren’t producing results, and it would’ve been too easy to say “Oh well, shucks, my art is probably not even that good then”.
Yet, she didn’t. She identified a problem and found a solution. Will it work? Who knows.
But if she keeps trying different things, something will.
Element 3: Work smart. Change direction if you have to.
Put Your Phone Down
The reason Kim Kardashian is still relevant and Paris Hilton isn’t, is because clan Kardashian put in the work. It doesn’t matter what you think about them, there’s no denying their work ethic is enviable.
So put down the Netflix, nobody cares if you can binge-watch 3 series in one night.
Kill the Facebook tab, you’re not missing out on anything and all babies look the same anyway.
Put your phone in sleep mode, get some coffee and put some instrumental music on.
And get to work.
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