Be Prolific and Patient
the closest you can get to “guaranteeing success”
I think being prolific is the closest you can get to “guaranteeing success” at whatever it is you want to succeed at.
Why?
Being prolific ensures you get better over time. Whatever it is you want to spend your life working on, it’s almost certainly true that you will need to be good at it in order to succeed at making a living from it1. And the best way to get good at something is to do it a lot more than the average person. There are, of course, other key ingredients to improvement (like analyzing your gaps, coaching from people already world class at it, etc) — but none of it matters if you don’t do the thing a ton. There is a clear corollary to this too: you should focus your energy on something that feels effortless to spend an obsessive amount of time on. This allows you to actually be prolific at it.
Why else is being prolific good general advice? Being prolific in the way I mean it requires finishing things. Writing a ton of half-finished (and abandoned) short stories or essays will limit your improvement. You end up just getting better at starting new stories or essays. Not finishing great ones. It is crucial to finish things because it allows you to see your own progress over time (and learn from your past work), find an audience, get feedback from the world, and go from amateur to pro (in the Steven Pressfield sense). This was part of the value to my “30 Days of Creative Programming” project and how I’ve shifted to thinking about rotating my interests in larger, modular “chunks” throughout the year.
It also seems that for most fields and most people who eventually succeed, things take time (more on dealing with that soon). It is rare to succeed from your first piece of work. So being prolific evens the odds and corrects for the randomness of the world (what’s popular at a given time, the right person seeing something, etc).
Ok, so that is the value of being prolific. But is that enough?
No, I don’t think it is. I think in order to be prolific, you have to be patient.
This is because being patient ensures you don’t lose hope and quit, which would thereby break the “be prolific” rule. Orienting around the idea that “your life’s work will take a ton of time” removes a lot of the anxiety, urgency, burn out, and bad decision making that can accompany those things. In other words, this “patience orientation” ensures the work stays light and playful, or as Graham Duncan puts it, keeps your grip “loose”.
It’s not just that patience helps you be more prolific though, the reverse is also true. Being prolific has a positive effect on being patient: having a ton of finished work that improves over time will help you “keep the faith” through tough times and prevents you from getting antsy. You’ll have your body of work, proof you are getting better and producing things you are proud of. This is the stop gap against idle daydreaming, thinking everything will work out for you without the accompanying required action. That really matters to having the persistence and longterm view required to succeed in a sustainable, career-long way. You want delicate tension between urgency to ship better things over time and the patience to keep going without rushing the work.
This is like the advice I first saw articulated so well by Visa and have taken on as a sort of mantra ever since: so much of success is actually just about managing your own psychology effectively. You have to stop your inner critic, the comparison demons, the fear of missing out, short term distractions, creeping despondence or the urge to pivot. Those who can do this are able to keep pursuing their life’s work and therefore are more likely to succeed over a long enough time period.
There are three possible exceptions to this guidance: the one hit wonders, the slow and low craftsman, and the lottery winners2. In each of of these groups, we see either hidden work which counts as being prolific or luck which I don’t think anyone should aspire to replicate as a strategy.
It’s your life’s work, it’s supposed to take time and be difficult. Good luck (to you and me both).
that’s my basic definition of succeeding at the right thing, since presumably the thing you want to succeed at is the thing you want to spend most of your time on
Another post could probably be written on these exceptions… I don’t have the time right now to include them in this footnote, forgive me!