What every high-achiever actually does to look like an ‘overnight success’

“You’ve always been a good writer.”

As innocuous as that sounds, that quip is near the top of my list of things someone could say to quietly aggravate me. 

I had to publish hundreds of articles before hearing that for the first time. Whatever ability I have as a writer is a consequence of showing up for a long enough time to accrue a huge amount of work. 

And even after many years of practice, I still don’t have the talent or wit I wish I did, nor does my pen seem as sharp as my favorite authors. I always liked how 19th century violin virtuoso Pablo De Sarasate put it: “For 37 years I’ve practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius.”

As De Sarasate and other high performers across disciplines have shown, natural talent may catalyze interests early on, but over time it’s a negligible part of the equation. 

There’s a fascinating 1988 paper by Dean Keith Simonton titled Age and Outstanding Achievement: What Do We Know After a Century of Research? In measuring how “successful” someone is in a creative field, he found a strong association across three variables: 

1. Precocity: How early or late in life someone begins practicing their craft
2. Longevity: How many years someone practices their craft
3. Rate of output: How much someone produces in a given amount of time

A lifetime of great work seems to hinge on these factors measurably more than talent or coaching.

I find it helpful to see it stated so explicitly — these are puzzle pieces to climbing to the top of a profession. 

“Those who generate the most contributions at the end of a career,” Simonton said, “also tend to have begun their careers at earlier ages, ended their careers at later ages, and produced at extraordinary rates throughout their careers.”

Another observation he noted in the study was that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is “largely irrelevant.”

Here’s Simonton again: 

These three components are conspicuously linked with each other: Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.

The miracle of quantity

I wrote last month on the benefits of being as prolific as possible, and Simonton’s paper reinforces the idea not because he advocates for huge volumes of work, but because he found that the chances of success or failure don’t necessarily increase over time.

According to Simonton’s research, the stretch of your career that has the most successes will also see the most failures. It’s particularly the case for creative and entrepreneurial pursuits. 

Beethoven, for example, produced his most famous works during a time he also created symphonies that remain unknown to this day. 

Simonton again: 

[C]reativity is a probabilistic consequence of productivity, a relationship that holds both within and across careers. Within single careers, the count of major works per age period will be a positive function of total works generated each period, yielding a quality ratio that exhibits no systematic developmental trends.

And across careers, those individual creators who are the most productive will also tend, on the average, to be the most creative: Individual variation in quantity is positively associated with variation in quality.

In effect, your batting average is your batting average, but you can still generate more hits if you give yourself more attempts at bat.

If you want to be known for something, then, your best bet is to try to make a name for yourself through quantity. You likely won’t be able to put forth any of your best ideas without first producing many, many ideas. 

“A creator’s most distinguished work,” Simonton maintained, “will appear in those career periods when productivity is highest.”

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