Overnight Success

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are from the winter I learned how to ice skate. I was maybe five, and I was determined. There was an ice rink in the park around the block from our house where I first skated. But after a day of freezing while watching me, my parents made me my own ice rink in our backyard. 

I spent hours out there, falling down and getting back up. I don’t know how many days of going out there again and again it took, but the more time I spent on my skates, the more comfortable I got. After a while I could skate the full circle before falling down again. And eventually, I could skate [with crossovers and everything].

No one ever saw the hard work. Well, my parents saw a lot of it from the kitchen window. But no one except me knows the full extent of the effort that went into learning how to glide on the ice. The next time I skated on that rink in the park, I just looked like a kid who could skate. And it’s likely that no one who saw me considered the work it took to get me there.

I think that’s how almost everything in life goes though. No one except you knows the effort you put into that thing you care so much about. And no one even knows to think about it either. Unless maybe they have put countless hours of effort into a similar thing. They just call you an overnight success. Or they say your impressive athletic performance came out of nowhere.

But, there were years of hard work before you became an overnight success. You put years of effort into making that thing you are good at look effortless to someone else. And your athletic performance didn’t come out of nowhere. It came after years of training; practicing when no one is around to see it.

I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to running. It’s a place where you can have big goals that might take you years to achieve. Even then, you might never get there. But running is also a place where you can see the incremental results as you inch closer and closer. Being able to see the improvements, even if no one else is paying attention, is enough to keep working when it’s something you love.

This whole summer, I’ve gotten to watch someone put in the hours of work toward realizing one of their dreams. It’s actually been the last five months, not just the summer. It’s been something they have wanted for at least the twelve years I’ve known them. And actually, a lot more work went into the last several years to get to the last five months. Writing like a hundred songs to find the handful that finally felt like the ones to share.

The part that will be visible to the rest of the world will be four songs; less than twenty minutes of music. I think a lot of people will enjoy it too. But what I will hear when I listen to it is the years of work that went into making it real. I’ll see countless hours spent creating music, and months of recording and editing until it was just right. And I’ll know that all I’ve seen is only a small part of the whole picture.

I think that’s how it’s supposed to work though. Creating is not for the faint of heart. Neither is sharing what you create, or any opportunity when you are truly chasing down a dream. All the hard work you put in will always be mostly invisible to everyone else. 

Everyone else just gets to experience magic. And only you will know what it took to create your magic.