Get the book!

Sketchplanations podcast photo of Rob Bell, Tom Pellereau and Jono Hey

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

Overnight success

👇 Get new sketches each week

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is fond of saying:

"Timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you seem like an overnight success."

Rarely have I heard someone so clearly articulate what it usually takes to do well at something and how commonly we misrepresent the path to success.

Sketching an iceberg in which about 90% of the iceberg is unseen under the surface seemed like an appropriate approach.

Biz Stone explains his story in Things a Little Bird Told Me .

Related Ideas to Overnight Success

Also see:

Published 26 Nov 2023

Get the book!

Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

Keep exploring

Yak shaving

How canal works to allow a boat to travel uphill

Canal Locks

Hotel Drying Technique

Eponym

The Iceberg Model

To scale, you first have to do things that don't scale, advice from Paul Graham and Brian Chesky of AirBnB for scaling companies shown with a founder packing boxes themselves like Jeff Bezos of Amazon

To Scale, First Do Things That Don't Scale

Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do. It's pretty frequent in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development, where when tackling one thing, you often find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems. Yak shaving features, lovingly polished, in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures. More: Here's a brilliant 40s clip of Hal changing a lightbulb from Malcolm in the Middle, classic yak shaving Early yak shaving features in the song There's a Hole in My Bucket in which fixing a bucket requires straw, which requires a knife to cut it, but the knife needs sharpening, which needs a stone, which is too dry and needs wetting with water, which needs fetching...with a bucket The first I found of yak shaving was a short article on productivity in the first issue of Make magazine by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann. Yak in the style of Alison Green and Adam Stower's excellent children's book, What can you Stack on the Back of a Yak?Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do. It's pretty frequent in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development, where when tackling one thing, you often find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems. Yak shaving features, lovingly polished, in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures. More: Here's a brilliant 40s clip of Hal changing a lightbulb from Malcolm in the Middle, classic yak shaving Early yak shaving features in the song There's a Hole in My Bucket in which fixing a bucket requires straw, which requires a knife to cut it, but the knife needs sharpening, which needs a stone, which is too dry and needs wetting with water, which needs fetching...with a bucket The first I found of yak shaving was a short article on productivity in the first issue of Make magazine by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann. Yak in the style of Alison Green and Adam Stower's excellent children's book, What can you Stack on the Back of a Yak?

Newer

RRandom

Older

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.