What success requires of you

Thinking back on my years working in the tech industry, particularly back when I used to make content on Instagram, I see a stark difference in who I was back then and who I am today. When I first started writing and posting on Instagram, I was about 20 years old and had only really been working for about 2 years, mostly as a freelancer and at a startup. And with time and effort, eventually the audience started to grow quite well and after 2-3 years I was up at around 16k followers. No matter who you are and what you do, to me that was a substantial amount.

But with all that, I also felt an immense pressure, at the same time as I also was very nonchalant about what I’d actually acquired, and the responsibility in managing that. Honestly it’s not about people’s expectations, as that was never something I paid much attention to. Rather it was about facilitating the attention I had managed to direct on myself as someone who saw himself as driven, capable and good at what he did.

But as I said, carrying that nonchalance, or maybe naivety is a better word, I wasn’t able to truly respect the opportunity I had in my position at that time. I didn’t have the life experience nor frankly the maturity to realize the potential in it all, and instead did what most 20-somethings do at that time, I focused on myself. Even though I was building cool projects with clients and had the opportunity to do things related to my social media following, I felt a real lack in my own experience working in the industry. So eventually, when it all became too much about production and numbers, I stopped, and changed direction to a proper career in tech as an employee.

Now that I’ve been turning my focus over towards my own business and content creation again, I am again introduced to the perils of building a following and creating content that somehow garners attention in a way you are comfortable or really okay with. And as I’m doing this work again, albeit with completely different circumstances, I am thrown back to how it felt back then to do this kind of work. Really, a part of me is astonished by the fact that I didn’t continue and try to really facilitate and manage the results I had been able to build up properly. But I quickly realize I simple wasn’t capable.

What success requires of you, is a completely different level of discipline than you imagine as you aspire to achieve it. Because achieving success, though tough, is not the hardest part. Getting people to pay attention to you is not the hardest thing. What is truly hard, is making sure people keep paying attention to you. What is incredibly hard, is to maintain that level of success that you initially achieve. Because even though we think we know every detail as to why we did succeed, we know next to nothing about what actually made us successful.

Nasim Nicholas Taleb is a man who has preached the idea that we are all extremely naive in our perception of our own ability to perceive the cause of events in the world. In one of his books The Black Swan, he talks about how the most impactful events in our history have been events no-one properly could’ve predicted, and that no matter how much we wish to, we can’t derive predictions on what will happen based on what has happened before.

Success for us humans, is so much about figuring out what works, and repeating that as much as possible, iterating slowly and in small ways to try to improve the results while not squandering them completely. We derive our idea of why things work the way they work from trial and error, sometimes reasoning with data and statistics, possible references to psychology, while we are grasping for something to hold on to in the darkness that is our random reality.

With that in mind, success requires you to remain diligent in your pursuit of improvement in the value you produce. Not necessarily for the profit itself, but for that fact that people want new things, and competition is all around. It requires that you put in system, the processes you have used to produce the value that you are reaping the rewards from. That you, once you run into trouble or a problem, track and document the lessons you learn and how you can avoid that situation in the future.

Most of all, success requires a selfless and mature mind that is capable of putting it’s own desires on pause in the pursuit of betterment and being in service of others. Because it is because of those others that we can enjoy the spoils of our own work. Without the customer, the user, we would never be able to reap any rewards at all. These are the people who pay for our lifestyles, our dreams and our desires. While success, achievement, requires a certain level of selfishness, to thrive and to accomplish, it does not have to come at the cost of the person who pays for it all.

The discipline I am talking about, is both the discipline to systemize your processes in order to consistently reproduce the same value on a regular basis without loosing quality, but also the discipline to continually develop your craft, your product, your service to improve the value it produces. Yes, you are being hunted by your competitors who are after your customers, your income stream. But the true reason is because you are in a privileged position of influence, someone who is given money in exchange for something people find valuable. To truly respect and appreciate that, requires that selfless and mature mind to focus on not oneself, but on the the work.

That, is exactly what I was lacking when I first attained a level of success I absolutely was striving for, and wanted to go beyond. It was that lack that resulted in me letting go of all of the opportunities that lied in front of me, simply because I wasn’t capable of taking advantage and managing them. And that is truly the case for us all, throughout our entire lives. We are presented with opportunities for growth and success all the time, in ways we both become conscious of, and never are conscious of simply because we are not able to see them for our lack of skill, ability, knowledge or a combination of them all.

So take this lesson from my own life, and use it in your own. If you are a young person who is ambitious and wants to achieve great things and be a person of influence, realize your own limits. You are in a time of your life where you have few things to loose, and so many things to gain from takings risks. And you have the naive and ambitious arrogance that is natural to being a youngling to drive you through the toughest of times. But don’t let all of that push you in a direction where you are not capable of delivering on your promises. Trust me, you don’t want explosive growth beyond your wildest dreams. It never lasts.

What you want is steady and healthy growth over a longer period, that can be sustained throughout your life. A pace where you are able to both appreciate what you achieve while aiming higher in your pursuit, able to take notes on the lessons you learn so as to not repeat them again. This, is what I learned in the past 10+ years of work, both in content creation and in the industry. Use time to your advantage in combination with the tried and tested process of iteration and compound interest, where eventually, your 1% increase will yield 100x the results to the 1% increase you managed in the beginning.

Develop the discipline of processes as well as of incremental improvement, and realize that success is a privilege of service and of using your craft to sustain yourself. It’s not something to brag about or to flaunt around the neighborhood, but rather it’s something to respect and to manage with selflessness and with maturity. That, to me, is what success requires of you.