Welcome to the Action Digest, the home of hacks and insights to help your creative side grow up big and strong.

Here’s the forecast for this week’s action:

• 📈 We expose the illusion of fast success and reaffirm the importance of patience by taking a closer look at the journeys of young hotshots.

• ✏️ We learn why the road to greatness is long, but not necessarily straight, with an author who has sold millions of novels.

• 🎯 A recent review of scientific studies reveals five rules for elite practice sessions.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-22 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. Long foretold, long last—short notice, soon will pass.

Morgan Freeman started acting when he was nine years old. His career didn’t take off until 1986, when he was 50 years of age. 

Freeman was once asked for his advice to young people who feel the need to succeed right away. 

“If it happens right away it’s gonna stop right away,” Freeman advises. “That’s a forgone conclusion. It’s just like weather, you know. I’m a sailor and at sea we have a saying: ‘weather that’s short foretold, shall soon pass. Long foretold, long last.’ So take your time. Learn what you’re doing. Keep moving forward, just keep plugging along, because this isn’t easy work.” 

The subject of today’s edition is the slowness of success.

But while Morgan Freeman’s career took a while to take off, some people succeed at a young age. So are they the exception to the rule? 

2. About as slow as it gets

Jimmy Donaldson, otherwise known as MrBeast, owns the most subscribed to YouTube channel in the world and has an estimated net worth of $500 million. 

He is also just 26 years old.

At first glance, it seems as though his success happened rapidly after around 2020.  

Yet Jimmy argues things have moved painfully slow. 

“It’s been crazy because I’ve been doing it since I was 11,” Jimmy recalls, “it was about as slow as it gets. So when I was a young teenager, I was getting no views, had no money, had no equipment. And so for the most part, it was just like, I was just trying to scrounge money so I could buy equipment because I was using my brother’s old laptop. And so my first couple hundred videos, I didn’t have a microphone. Like imagine just like crackly, terrible voice.” “And I saved up for like six months. I mean, I was just doing video game videos and they were terrible, but I saved up. I got a real computer. And so now I could actually record the video games at high quality. I have a microphone. I’m like 15. And I just kept going and going and going. Trying to figure out what are some of the hot spots. Essentially, up until 18, I had been doing YouTube pretty religiously, but I was making no money.” 

After seven years, hundreds of videos, and only a few thousand subscribers, many kids would have moved onto something else. Not Jimmy. He told his parents he was going to community college but just spent the whole time editing videos in his car. He started putting in more hours than ever before. 

“And that was kind of when I was just like—15 hours a day, all in. I was like, I’m f***** if this doesn’t work. And actually, I had some videos pop off. I couldn't tell you which ones, but I had a month where I made 20 grand because I just had some videos just do really, really well. And then I came home and I was like, yeah, I haven't been going to college. And I moved out the next day.” 

Jimmy may have succeeded young, but he most definitely did not succeed fast. 

So why is it that success tends to take so long to arrive?

3. Going way past ten thousand hours

In 1987, Bill Gates became the world's youngest self-made billionaire of the day at age 32. 

But as Malcolm Gladwell points out, this is another example of slow success in disguise. 

“Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eight grader [age 13] in 1968,” Gladwell writes, explaining that Gates was fortunate to have access to one of the only school computers in the world at the time, “from that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer room.“

“’It was my obsession,’ Gates says of his early high school years. ‘I skipped athletics, I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.’” 

When access to the school computer dried up, he began coding at the office of a local company. “In one seven-month period in 1971,” Gladwell continues, “Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.” 

And when the company went bankrupt, Gates found another way to gain access to a computer: “‘I didn’t get to use the computer the whole summer. This is when I was fifteen and sixteen. Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center and the physics department. They were on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but with this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything.’ Gates laughed. ‘I’d leave at night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University of Washington from my house. Or I’d take the bus.’”

“And what did virtually all of those opportunities have in common?” Gladwell concludes, “they gave Bill Gates extra time to practice. By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past ten thousand hours. How many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience Gates had? ‘If there were fifty in the world, I’d be stunned,’ he says. ‘There was C-Cubed and the payroll stuff we did, then TRW—all those things came together. I had a better exposure to software development at a young age that I think anyone did in that period of time.’”

MrBeast and Gates worked at the most furious pace possible to hone their craft. It still took them almost a decade to see their hard work pay off. They succeeded young because they started young, but success was nonetheless a long time coming. 

Does this mean we need to start working obsessively on our craft in middle school to make it to the top? Of course not. The slow road to success has plenty of patience for detours…

4. The road to greatness is long but it doesn’t have to be straight

Adele Parks is one of the bestselling authors of women's fiction in the world.

Just like Freeman, MrBeast, and Gates, she started writing young—during visits to her grandfather’s house when she was just five years old. 

“He would get me to settle down by firstly buying me a book or comic,” Parks remembers, “but I would read them very quickly, and so towards the end of the weekend, he would then say, ‘Well, why don't you write me a book?’ And then I would write a book.” “But for a long time… for like five, six, seven years, I would do this pretty much every weekend. And then I would write them faster and faster.”

Perhaps the next logical step for young Parks and her passion for writing would have been to study literature at University and begin churning out Pulitzer winning novels. Instead, she pursued a career in marketing. 

“Back in the UK in 1992, I moved to London and started a career in advertising. The next decade reads like, well, one of my books... I played out my life at double speed. I worked extremely hard, earning prestigious promotions in London’s top agencies on cool accounts such as Wonderbra and Levi's. I moved to Botswana for a couple of years.”

Eventually, more than twenty years after she started speedwriting novels with her grandparents, Parks was ready to put pen back to paper. In the year 2000, at 31 years old, she published her first novel. The book did well but it didn’t accomplish her goal of becoming a #1 bestseller. 

So she kept going, putting out a book every year, for another twenty years.

“I mean I was writing for 19 years before I got my first number one.” But then the hits just kept coming. “And interestingly, I got my first number one, and then I got [another] two during lockdown.” 

The road to greatness is long but it doesn’t have to be straight. Detours are not only permissible, but can often enrich both the journey and the destination. 

5. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

The long road to greatness is paved with action.

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, businessfolk, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move.

And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method journaling system makes it easy to do exactly that.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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