How to Become an Overnight Success
You've heard the phrase "overnight success."
Some people insist it doesn't exist. These days, if you count being widely known as a kind of success, I'd say it clearly can. One clip catches, good or bad, and someone lands in the global feed overnight, whether or not a decade of work sits behind it.
At least, it certainly looks like success. A sudden reputation as an expert in the field. A wave of new followers. A spike in demand for whatever you sell.
From a professional angle, though, there's far more to it. In fact, it’s all about what we don’t see, and hadn’t noticed.
The occasional fluke aside, an “overnight success” is in fact usually the product of persistence and iteration, and lots of it.
Nobody becomes a great coach overnight. Yes, the soft skills can be there from day one, and the right education can shift your approach almost immediately. Anyone who has built meaningful, measurable success — and now I mean with clients, not with content — got there on a template that can be applied almost everywhere else in life:
Do. Observe. Learn. Iterate. Repeat.
Coach Benny Price teaching personal trainers how to setup and cue a pulldown effectively
That loop is the thing "experience" is supposed to mean. Plenty of trainers have been on the floor for years without it, because the years looked more like:
Do. Do. Do. Do. Repeat.
Most of the time, that's because we’ve never been taught how to think about exercise. We were handed one correct way for everyone and sent off to “coach” it. So we treat each client as a delivery task instead of a design case, and this is what lets us down.
If you’ve been in the PT game for a while and don’t feel like you’ve been successful, a change in mindset could help. It means leaving "the way" behind and working out an approach that creates the value people are paying a coach for. After that, it's persistence, iteration, and experience stacking up: finding what works best for you and your clients, right now.
When it finally lands, they'll probably call you an overnight success too.
Let them.
Want to change the way you see exercise forever?
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