Overnight success.

You know, the two guys who throw together a brilliant idea in some West Coast garage, stitch it up with $10 hosting and a few week’s later sit down to give interviews for their Wired cover story. The media runs these stories because let’s face it, they make great news, even if they are entirely fictional.

There is no such thing as an overnight success, just like there is no such thing as a “four hour work week” (sorry Tim), both are the result of creative reimaginings of the word work. Most entrepreneurs who have had the meteoric rise to prominence that make magazine covers do so because of the months and years they spent in relative obscurity doing things that quietly failed. The project that brought them onto the stage was the direct result of these failures, the synthesis of everything they learned when the world wasn’t paying attention. Even if Twitter only took two weeks to build and SXSW to launch, it was really the years that Biz and Ev spent grinding away that turned it into what it is today.

Being successful as an entrepreneur is almost exclusively the ability to overcome thousands of tiny problems before you run out of money. The people who are great at it aren’t necessarily geniuses or visionaries, they are just extraordinarily good at finding solutions quickly and making more right decisions than wrong ones. The talent, tenacity and experience required to do this doesn’t come overnight.

It’s a long, dirty, uneven and frustrating evolution. It’s built on the bones of dead end jobs, lost projects, work that leads nowhere and failure.

Lots of failure.

Ignoring all the background work and focusing on the soundbites has lead many entrepreneurs to believe that if they haven’t made it in 3 months it’s all over for them. This is simply not true. The web makes business faster, more efficient and cheaper but it doesn’t take away from the fact that businesses need real work to succeed.