Success means different things to different people. For this article, I’ll use financial success or financial wealth building as the sole success factor.
If you are looking to find out what success really means to you I recommend you check out my related article: Judging success by your own standards
For now, let’s dive into the hard and unpopular truth I discovered about the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.
Putting in the work
It’s not just physical labour I’m talking about, it’s mental as well. Putting in the work means that you actually got to do something in order to progress in life.
The only way to succeed fast is to expect little. If you are happy with the basics you’ll be successful very fast.
However, if I look at my Instagram audience I reckon this not to be the goal.
How do I know?
Whenever I drop a bullshit post saying: “I’m going to be the first millionaire in my family, comment YES to affirm” I get 600 comments, 10k+ likes and 2500 saves.
If I drop some high-quality content that actually tries to teach people something, like:
- way’s to recognise bullshit NFT projects,
- the power of compounding, or,
- the fastest way it took people to become a millionaire was about 12 years,
I get a staggering 43 saves, 136 likes and 19 comments (of which 17 bots).
The big difference between these pieces of content?
In order to consume the latter, one actually has to put in the work. Suddenly there are 10 slides to check, a 5-minute article to be read, or a 1-minute video with subtitles to be watched. There’s work to be done.
Way easier would be to just double-tap a single line of text and watch the magic happen. Or just to buy that stupid looking jpeg and become a victim of scammers instead of actually doing some due diligence and finding some high-quality NFT projects to invest in.
As a creator, this frustrates me. Yet at the same time, it shows me that it’s easy to stand out from the crowd. It’s actually easy to become more successful in any field because so many people lack the motivation to actually dig in and do the work.
So, now you know how not to be successful. How do you achieve the opposite?
Stay curious!
I’m writing this article on a Saturday. This is my way of staying ahead of the curve; increasing productivity.
I started the day with a coffee at the local bar. My phone battery charged. I read my favourite newsletters. I noted down the topics that sparked my interest. Topics I wanted to learn more about.
The newsletter content leads me to some new follow-worthy people on social media and some new newsletters to subscribe to.
I took some screenshots of Twitter threads that I found refreshing and created content out of them to post on Instagram.
I shared some insights with friends I know who share the same interest. They respond by sending me some interesting content.
I went down this rabbit hole as far as my battery let me. When it died I paid my bill and went back to my house to continue the work.
The first thing I did back home was document the content and valuable links I saved earlier. Reading it again and documenting it brought up some more questions and related topics worth exploring. I wrote these questions and possible content topics down. I found some nice book recommendations to go even deeper down some specific rabbit holes.
Then I opened a new file and started writing this article. And here we are.
For me, this is “putting in the work”.
How this contributes to success
It’s not paying me anything yet, but I’m convinced that there is someone who is going to read this and thinks: Fuck yes, I’m going to stop double-tapping those bullshit posts and start going down rabbit holes to see where they lead me.
And eventually, he or she is going to refer a friend, and another one and another one. And one of them is going to pay me for some future product I’ll drop. And even if that’s not the case, by studying, documenting and then rephrasing the lessons I learned in my own words, I am slowly mastering a craft.
So even if this article turns out to be a worthless piece of shit that I’m ashamed of in 10 years, it is part of a process that brings me closer to my goals. This contributes to my future successes.
Now it’s your turn to turn the switch and start feeding your curiosity.
Let me know if you start your journey.