Overnight Sensationalism and how it affects us…

Some unknown writer writes a book and next thing you know it’s a New York Times Bestseller and con­sid­ered an overnight sen­sa­tion. Some star­let actress gets a new hair­cut that lands her on the cover of Vogue and what do you know she becomes an overnight sen­sa­tion. An older gen­tle­man sings a clever song on American Idol and you guessed it, he too becomes an overnight sen­sa­tion. So what is all this overnight sen­sa­tion­al­ism about?

It reminds me of the clas­sic love story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy fights off drag­ons, police, gang­sters, ex-​boyfriend, or par­ents to get girl back. And they live hap­pily ever after. But, it just sim­ply does not work like that. It just doesn’t hap­pen that eas­ily. There truly is no such thing as an overnight sen­sa­tion. Everything in life involves work. From mar­riages to careers.

You know that expres­sion, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”? After all the time it took to actu­ally build Rome when it was finally com­pleted I’m sure it became an overnight sen­sa­tion. Not because it sprang up overnight, but because peo­ple came to real­ize what a mar­vel of archi­tec­ture it was. But, what if, dur­ing its build­ing, the Romans decided that their city was not get­ting the recog­ni­tion that it deserved? So instead of con­tin­u­ing to build, they stopped, tore down their progress up to that point and com­pletely aban­doned it. Would that make sense? Do we, in a way, do this with our own goals?

The façade of overnight suc­cess is what makes peo­ple give up on their goals after a short period of time. Marriages end after just a few months because the cou­ple isn’t liv­ing the fairy­tale that they dreamed of. Employees pull out of their cho­sen pro­fes­sions when they don’t climb the ranks as quickly as they had expected. These are the effects of overnight sen­sa­tion­al­ism.

The truth is that those who do lit­er­ally become overnight sen­sa­tions often become overnight fail­ures because they have noth­ing to build on. So instead of believ­ing hype, mar­ket­ing and overnight sen­sa­tion­al­ism let’s work hard, be patient and over­come obsta­cles to see our goals to fruition.

Thanks for read­ing,