Overnight success is a lie. Or at least, it’s never the whole story.
If you’ve had the radio on lately, you’ve probably heard Alex Warren. And if radio isn’t your thing, his rise has been hard to miss on TikTok and Instagram.
His songs “Ordinary” and “Eternity” have been topping charts, and his first album seemed to materialise out of nowhere. But what looks like overnight success rarely is.
Alex knows social media inside out. Before “Ordinary” was even released, he had a strategy to post about it more than 100 times. In one interview, he mentioned it took 42 posts before he got any real positive feedback on the song.
42 posts before it landed. Over 100 in total.
I talk to business owners all the time who test a new idea or a new offer, post about it twice, and quietly give up when the likes and comments don’t arrive. Testing something twice isn’t testing. It’s barely clearing your throat.
And here’s the part most people miss. Before those 100 posts, Alex had been posting on YouTube since he was ten. More than a decade learning how to find an audience, so that when his moment arrived, he had the skills to meet it. It took over a decade of dedication for him to become an overnight success.
I’ve lived a version of this myself.
I don’t have millions of followers. But I have a solid mailing list and a LinkedIn following I’ve built over years. So when I evolved my business after the pandemic, those people were already there when I needed them – and from the outside, it looked like an overnight success.
What people didn’t see was the 15 years before it. The years after I left corporate, posting blogs every single week when literally no one was reading. I showed up and practised because I knew I had to learn to communicate my IP and thinking in a way that was concise and engaging enough for an attention economy that keeps shrinking. Over time, the numbers climbed. Today, my articles are one of my highest-converting strategies. But it absolutely did not happen overnight.
And if we go back further still, I’ve spent decades building the skills that make me valuable to my clients now. My corporate years. My business wins and my business failures. Every idea that flopped, and every one that worked.
I’m not the most patient person in the world. I take action fast. But the thing I’ve had to learn, over and over, is the value of staying the course.
So if you’ve tried a couple of posts and they’re not landing, I want to urge you not to read that as a verdict. Read it as post number two. Try again. If you want a number to aim for, aim for 42 and watch for the first signs of life. Aim for 100, and you might just have your own moment of “overnight” success.
Now is not the time to give up. It’s the time to experiment until you find the thing that works – and then to keep doing it long after you’re bored of it.
Why? Because it’s noisier out there than it has ever been. More content, more voices, more noise to cut through than at any point in history. And in a world where everyone is searching for someone to trust, the people who win are not the loudest. They’re the ones who lead with conviction, consistently, until they become the obvious choice.
That’s the work. Show up, stay the course, and back yourself long enough to cut through.
Janine x