What are you doing when they’re not watching?
Whenever I hear a successful person speak, they talk about the years of grinding. Bill Gates famously coded for most of his waking hours. Baseball players hit thousands of balls in the batting cages. Comics get up in front of 10 people in the back of a bar at midnight just to run a new joke. Magicians practice until their hands are blistered and bleeding (I know because I’ve done it). Successful people put in hours and hours of work when literally nobody is watching. When nobody is asking them to do it.
I recently stumbled on a guy selling an unbelievable amount of online courses. He’s a master marketer, and the courses promise success with guarantees like “if you don’t make your money back in 30 days, I’ll pay you.” Good on him. He’s making a living by teaching other people how to make a living.
What he’s not selling you, though, is the fact that he spent an hour every day when he was twelve years old hand-copying sales letters. In his own words “I was only making $20 an hour, but I knew I was developing a SKILL that would pay dividends later.” Yet in his online course, he’s selling you the fruits of his own labor, trying to pass it off as instant success for anyone who buys his course.
The reality is that success is not defined by what can be easily packaged into an online course, it is defined by what we do when people aren’t watching. Success is defined by the countless hours we put in when we were first learning a skill.
If you were to take a cross section of your life at any given time, what are you doing? Are you practicing? Are you putting in the work? Or are you doom scrolling on Tik Tok?
Whenever a successful person talks about how you can duplicate their success, it usually comes down to put in the work for a really long time and don’t get upset when you don’t succeed. Neal Brennan once asked on his podcast, Blocks, “are you willing to be looked over for a decade?” Not a month. Not a year. A decade. Are you? Because that’s what it might take. We’re talking years, not instant success.
But you can’t sell that in an online course. “Buckle down for a decade and don’t complain” is not an idea you can monetize, even though that’s what it takes!
I’ve quoted him so many times, but Cal Newport’s Deep Work really gets to the heart of this. We become successful when we concentrate, challenge ourselves, and stretch our abilities, often alone, so that we become better at what we do by developing marketable and tangible skills.
And to be clear—I see myself on the ten-year trajectory too. I started full time, professional magic in January of 2023. So I likely have 8.5 years to go before I’ll be really, truly proficient. And I’m ok with that.
Likewise, I’m not saying we should avoid all courses or learning. In fact, taking courses and continuing your education is precisely how you get better. I learn new magic all the time. I’m arguing against the perceived simplicity of these things. Against the courses and people that convince you that you’ll be a master in half the time it took the person who is a master. It’s just not possible. There’s no substitute for putting in the hours, ever. Go after the people and courses who say “this will be hard,” not “you’ll be ready to go in seven simple weeks!”
So, figure out what you’re doing when there aren’t any cameras on you. The activity that if you wouldn’t see success for ten years, you’d still want to do. Whatever that is—running, cooking, magic, biology, anything—is what you’ll ultimately succeed at.