I have always been suspicious of the phrase "overnight success." It's too slick, too convenient. It’s designed to hide the years of drudgery that came before, and to endow whoever is lucky enough to have become the flavour of the month with the inevitability of a messiah.

The reality: most so-called overnight successes are ten-year slogs, punctuated by humiliations and failures that nobody wants to put on the book jacket. We love // obsess over speed, we romanticize the viral clip, the sudden breakout, the startup that rockets from garage to IPO in the time it takes the rest of us to muddle through another season of life. But these are, for the most part, fictions.

When I was younger, I wanted to believe in the miracle of acceleration. I wanted to think that if I was sharp enough, talented enough, lucky enough, my life could change in an instant. And who doesn’t want that? The idea of bypassing the “long apprenticeship” and leaping straight to mastery has its a narcotic pull. The magazines put the young founder on the cover. The podcasts book the wunderkind who seems to have hacked the system. And the rest of us? We’re left wondering what invisible ingredient we’re missing while we push our own boulder up the hill.

What I’ve come to understand is this.

The ten years no one talks about are the real story. Those years are where character is shaped. They are where you learn how to take rejection without falling apart, how to produce something decent on a bad day, how to keep showing up when the applause is nowhere to be found. Those are the years where you become boringly competent at things that never make for compelling anecdotes: filing taxes correctly, managing cash flow, negotiating without flinching. These are the unglamorous muscles that make the glamorous moments possible.

But competence isn’t sexy. So we pretend it doesn’t exist. We cut the movie of a life so that the boring scenes vanish into a montage, if they appear at all. The era of suffering is compressed into a thirty-second sequence set to music, and then - with a rising, inspiring chorus - we’re in the big stage moment. No one wants to watch the scene of a thirty-year-old sitting in a fluorescent-lit room trying to finish a draft while their rent stares back at them. But that’s the reality, and that’s the crucible.

This might go against the grain in an age of instant gratification: but success is supposed to be slow. If you get it too quickly, it breaks you. Look at the child stars who melt down before our eyes, the athletes who peak early and then fade into bitterness, the startups that raise too much money too soon and collapse under their own weight. The slow burn protects you. It hardens you in ways the quick ascent never does. It forces you to live with yourself in the in-between.

Isn’t it possible to move fast, to capitalize on momentum, to sprint when the opportunity arises? Of course. But that sprint will still be built on years of hidden training. You can run a marathon without stretching first, but you’ll wreck yourself in the process. I don’t think we do our children any favors when we sell them the story of overnight success. We leave them unprepared for the truth that mastery is monotony stretched over a decade.

The part that stings the most: nobody cares about your decade of monotony. Nobody gives a shit. They only care when the payoff arrives. That creates a kind of psychic violence: you know how much you’ve suffered, how many nights you’ve doubted yourself, how many compromises you’ve had to swallow, and then someone else calls you an overnight success as if those years never happened. The phrase takes a blowtorch to your history. It takes a lifetime of preparation and reduces it to a punchline.

I’ve seen friends fall apart under the weight of all this. They’re told they are lucky, as if luck is what carried them through years of working jobs they hated to fund their passion. They’re told they “blew up overnight,” as if their slow burn through obscurity was somehow irrelevant. The language of overnight success is cruel because it invalidates the grind. It suggests that the grind wasn’t real, wasn’t necessary, wasn’t worth remembering.

But what if the grind is the point? What if the decade in the wilderness is not the prelude, it’s the substance? I have started to believe that success is not the moment when the world finally pays attention. Success is being the kind of person who can keep going without that attention. Because the attention always vanishes eventually, and you are left with yourself again. If you built yourself on recognition alone, you collapse when the recognition moves elsewhere. But if you built yourself on the invisible years, you keep moving regardless.

Let’s kill the myth. Shall we? Let’s admit that every so-called overnight success is a story edited for speed. Let’s tell the kids who dream of greatness that what they’re really dreaming of is a decade of drudgery and the drudgery may or may not be worth it, but the scars will be. And let’s ask ourselves whether we actually want what we say we want. Do you? Do you really want to be an overnight success if it means being unprepared for the weight of it? Or do you want to suffer through that long apprenticeship, where the victories are small and the defeats sting, so that when the larger stage comes, you’re strong enough to stand on it?

I choose the latter. I choose the decade. It is humiliating, unglamorous, exhausting - and it is also where life actually happens. The world may not notice until year eleven. By then, I’ll be ready.