Every “overnight success” you see had a thousand boring nights nobody filmed.

Sudden arrivals are almost always the visible end of a long, unrecorded stretch. What gets shown begins at the point something worked, because the years of practice before that make poor viewing and nobody was filming anyway. Judging your own beginning against somebody else’s highlight compares a full process with an edited result. The gap you feel is mostly missing footage.

When a rise looks instant, find out what that person was doing five years earlier. It is usually available and usually dull. Then measure your own progress against that timeline rather than the short version.