Overnight success

Hands holding up S-U-C-C-E-S-S against a sunrise.
You can dream of success, but overnight, success is just a dream.

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WotD: Overnight success

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Before we even begin to discuss it, you should realize that there is no such thing as overnight success.


With that understanding, overnight success is someone or something that becomes successful very quickly.


Remember the comedian Pikotaro and his pen-pineapple-apple-pen video? Yeah, well, where is he now?

See, that was not an overnight success. That was a nine-days’ wonder.

Something like the Apple iPhone was.

It was an instant hit and has since gone on to sell over 100 million units.

What we must keep in mind is that it takes a long time to become an overnight success.

Yes, sure, there are examples of things that seemingly became successful very quickly.

First, you need to ask yourself two questions: How long will it last, and how much preparation went into it behind the scenes?

Pen-pineapple-apple-pen went viral (perhaps not a good word to use these days), but it didn’t have legs.


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When was the last time you heard the song?

On the other hand, the iPhone is still going strong fourteen years after it was first released.

It has legs, but how much preparation went into it?

Well, I googled it and learned it took two and a half years to develop.

See what I mean?

We, the general public, may see a product become very popular very quickly and label it as an overnight success without considering the years of blood, sweat and tears invested in it before we even knew about it.

As we saw at the beginning of this post, overnight success is someone or something that becomes wildly successful very quickly, but there is no such thing as one in reality.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 67.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.



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