Busting the myth of the business overnight success

For many entrepreneurs starting out, there is the inevitable sense of romanticism around the notion of becoming the ‘next big thing’, or inventing the next multi-million dollar life-changing app, and becoming an overnight business success. However, the reality is somewhat different and there are very few startups that actually manage to achieve their goals and realise their ambitions overnight. Entrepreneurship tends to be more of a marathon than a sprint, with ambitious and passionate business builders knowing they are in for the long-haul before they achieve the large scale success they are hoping for. They are not on their own - so many of the most successful businesses today that we know as household names and which have become an integral part of our daily lives took years to build. While the media may make us feel as if successful businesses are born overnight, ultimately most of those overnight successes took 5, 10 or 20 years to build. Look at the story of Facebook, today one of the fasting scaling businesses in the world, yet founder Mark Zuckerberg had a series of businesses prior to starting Facebook that didn’t take off, and it wasn’t until Facebook’s fourth and fifth year that it started to achieve stellar success. These kind of long timelines are the norm rather than the exception for most entrepreneurs, and overnight success tends to be more of a myth than a reality. For most of us, the entrepreneurial journey to success will be a long one, but all the more interesting for it.