In the fall of 2018 my brother Scott and his friend Ivan launched a Kickstarter campaign for their latest brainchild: sunglasses that block digital screens.
The two entrepreneurs set a funding goal of $25,000 and pulled the trigger. Pledges came streaming in. The stream quickly became a flood, and within two weeks over a thousand backers had rushed to pledge $100,000 for the glasses. The campaign closed thirty days after launch with two thousand backers and $140,000 in pledges.
The glasses were an immediate hit. It’s rare that a product makes such a large splash on Kickstarter, Go Fund Me, Indiegogo, or other crowdfunding sites, and many onlookers tend to react in similar ways:
Those guys hit the jackpot!
Some people are just lucky.
I guess all it takes is the right idea to hit it big.
When we witness success it’s tempting to think that the recipient was just plain lucky. Luck lets us off the hook. If the successful “lottery winner” had actually worked their ass off for their success that would imply we could do the same if only we would get off our asses, put our heads down, and work.
The truth is that Scott has been tirelessly working on products for a decade, crafting one after another, yielding a string of minor successes and disappointing failures. He learned from each one and refined his process as he went. Ivan has been growing his network for years, putting diligent effort into meeting and providing value to people.
The product, combined with an extensive network and a launch that took weeks of hard work, produced a hard-won hit.
Overnight sensations are rare. “Genius” is rarer still. Not because genetics or random events rarely collide across time and space to produce them, but because it’s hard fucking work to succeed, and most of us don’t want to put in the work.
Do you want your own epic win? Your own overnight success?
Find something that interests you and dig into it. Don’t just scrape away at the surface, go deep. Understand it, consume everything there is to know about it, and start trying things.
Only then will you be on the path to a jackpot.