The 3 Truths About Success No One Posts on Instagram

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Unlocked Secrets They
Don't Tell You, the podcast where we pull back the
curtain on what it really takes to build the life
you want. I'm your host, and today we're talking about
something I see every single day and frankly, it's driving
me a little crazy. It's the instagram ification of success.

(00:23):
You know what I'm talking about. The perfectly curated feed
of the digital nomad on a laptop by the beach,
the gleaming luxury car in a sun drenched driveway, the
just hit six figures by twenty five post with a
beaming smile and a motivational quote in the caption. We
see these snippets, these perfect little snapshots, and we feel

(00:45):
a twinge, a twinge of envy of why not me,
and maybe even a little bit of inadequacy. But what
if I told you that the image we see on
social media is just the highlight reel, that the real, messy,
unglamorous truths about success are almost never ever posted. Today,

(01:06):
I want to talk about the three truths about success
that no one puts on their Instagram feed. The stuff
that happens when the camera's off, the filters are down,
and the reality of the grind sets in. Let's dive
right in with the first truth, truth number one. Success
is not a straight line. It's a tangled, confusing, and

(01:27):
often lonely maze. When we see that I did it post,
we assume a simple linear progression. You had an idea,
you worked hard, and then you succeeded. End of story.
But that's just not how it works. My own journey,
for example, has been a series of starts and stops.

(01:47):
A few years back, I launched a completely different business.
I poured my heart and soul into it. I worked
eighty hour weeks, I sacrificed weekends, friendships, and my sanity,
and guess what, it failed spectacularly. I don't post about
that on Instagram. You won't see a picture of me
looking dejected, staring at the empty bank account and questioning

(02:11):
every single life choice I'd ever made. That's not a
visually appealing post. But that failure, that tangled mess of
confusion and disappointment, was the single most important part of
my journey. It taught me more than any success ever could.
Successes filled with detours, wrong turns, and moments where you

(02:31):
genuinely wonder if you should just quit and go back
to a nine to five. It's about being lost in
the maze for a while, bumping into dead ends and
having to backtrack. The people who make it aren't the
ones who never got lost. They're the ones who kept
going even when they didn't know which way to turn.
They embraced the messy middle. Okay, let's move on to

(02:53):
the second truth. This one is a big one, and
it's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.
Number two. Success requires a level of sacrifice that you
will probably resent at some point. We see the dream
life and we think I want that, but we don't
always consider the cost that person jet setting around the

(03:15):
world for work might be doing it alone, missing important
family events and waking up in a new, unfamiliar hotel
room every other day. The entrepreneur with the luxury car
might have poured every single dollar they earned back into
the business for years, living on a ram and noodle
budget while their friends were out enjoying themselves. For me,

(03:36):
the sacrifice was time, specifically time with my friends and family.
There were years where I was so heads down in
my work that I missed birthdays, weddings, and countless casual
get togethers. I'll be honest, there were moments I felt
a deep, burning resentment, resentment toward my own ambition, toward
the business, and even toward my friends who seemed to

(03:58):
have so much more free time. It's not a happy feeling,
it's a lonely, isolating feeling. I remember a specific instance
where I was working on a Saturday night while my
friends were all at a party I couldn't attend. I
saw their stories on Instagram, laughing, dancing and just having
a good time, and I felt a profound sense of

(04:20):
missing out. That's the part you don't post. You post
the late night hustle photo with a coffee mug, but
you don't post the feeling of loneliness that comes with it.
Success demands sacrifice, and it's not always a noble, beautiful sacrifice.
Sometimes it's just plain hard and it hurts. The key

(04:42):
is to remember why you're making those sacrifices, to have
a clear vision of the future you're building. And now
for the third and final truth. This is perhaps the
most important and the most contrary to the social media narrative.
Truth number three. Success is not about being a superhero.
It's about being relentlessly average consistently, the Internet loves a prodigy,

(05:08):
a wonder kind, someone who seems to have just effortlessly
become an overnight success. We're told we need to be exceptional,
a genius, a visionary. But the truth is most successful
people are not superheroes. They're just people who showed up
day after day and did the unglamorous work.