No matter who you are, you won’t become successful overnight — and the sooner you internalize that, the better, says film director Spike Lee.
“One of the worst lies that’s been told to young people is that there’s a thing called ‘overnight success.’ That’s done a lot of damage to people,” Lee, 66, said at the 2023 LinkedIn Talent Connect Summit in New York earlier this year. “It’s not like you’re just out there, and the hand of God is going to come down from the heavens and say, ‘You are the next one.’ That is BS.”
For even the luckiest people, success is usually preceded by a lot of work, said Lee — even if it doesn’t seem apparent on the surface. His message: If you’re simply waiting around for the right opportunity or spotlight, but not doing anything to prepare for it or hasten its presence, you probably won’t achieve what you want.
In Lee’s case, he’s a longtime popular filmmaker with an Oscar, two Primetime Emmys and numerous other award nominations. But he had to “claw” to be taken seriously at first, he told LinkedIn editor-in-chief Daniel Roth in an interview last month.
“When I graduated from Morehouse College [in 1979], I knew I wanted to go to film school,” Lee said. “But that whole thing of … moving out to LA and working your way up from the mailroom, that don’t work for Black people.”
Lee was rejected from film schools at the University of Southern California and the American Film Institute, but accepted at New York University — based on the quality of his work, rather than his results on standardized tests like the GRE, he said.
Lee’s story isn’t uncommon, across most industries. Mark Cuban, a billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor, started cutting his teeth as a salesman at age 12 — but didn’t feel “successful” for the first time until age 28, or become a billionaire until age 40.
Most of the world’s biggest companies similarly took years of struggle and tight budgets to get off the ground, from tech giants like Microsoft to apparel behemoths like Nike.
Often, an “overnight success” only seems that way because you didn’t see the work that went into it — especially in today’s digital age, where highlights and wins on social media are more prolific than the full stories behind people’s triumphs. That trend contributes to poor mental health and low self-esteem in young people, studies show.
You can address that by embracing the ebbs and flows of your journey, and getting rid of the notion that your dreams will come true instantaneously, said Lee.
“It’s not going to happen overnight. There are going to be times where you want to cry and you want to quit,” he said at the LinkedIn summit. “You can’t quit. You’ve got to keep going!”
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