Don’t get me wrong, I am just a CEO of an SEO Copywriting Agency, not a professional Pastry Chef. But creating new recipes in my line of work has become my second nature.

What I’ve learned so far is that first you learn the rules of the game, then you break them and finally you make your own recipe without seeking any kind of approval.

Can you imagine Hemingway or Plath putting their creativity on hold while reading all existing how-to-be-a-successful-writer guides? No way! Either you write or you don’t write, there is no such thing as a guaranteed way to be successful.

Of course, taking useful courses for writing styling or investing in high-quality education will boost the tools of your existing copywriting charisma but will never make you a famous wordsmith. Doing the hard work of writing will do. Eventually.

Don’t be afraid, just do it

In 2010 I lost a bet over a cooking challenge between friends and end up baking my first (ever) wedding cake for a friend. Although one of my favorite hobbies was baking and trying new recipes since my teen years, this wedding cake was my baking armageddon.

Every time I thought that I had found the perfect recipe there was always something missing from the wedding cake. After 29 trials of different and extremely complicated recipes, I was ready to admit that I have failed. A month away from the wedding day, the bride-to-be and my good friend Anna said to me: “Why don’t you try to let yourself be free to follow your baking inspiration? Just trust and let the smells carry you away!”

That was an Aha moment in my entire life.

Inspiration is one of the X factors of everything. Good timing is another one.

That weekend I made an amazing wedding cake without any instructions found in an existing recipe. I made my own unique recipe. The couple smiled when they tasted it and a month later it was one of the highlights of the wedding party.

Throw away all the guidelines

Writing or reading about a skill is not the same as doing it. Talking about riding a bike is not the same as doing it. Guides can be helpful up to a point but if you are not willing to do the effort to create something, you will never accomplish anything.

Instead of spending 50 hours per week reading about writing or blogging, get yourself in front of a computer and start typing your own words. Take the risk. Put yourself out there. Taste the bitterness of failure if you want to find the key to success.

There is no secret sauce for being the Top of Anything. If there was then everyone reading all these How-to-Guides would be insanely rich and famous. Please, don’t confuse success with wealth. Being successful is all about accomplishment and rarely can include wealth.

We tend to forget that success doesn’t come easy!

What does it take to make it happen?

Hard work, discipline, laser focus, determination, persistence, and resilience could help us to make our dreams happen. But only if life throws the dice with a little bit of good luck dust. And may I add that having a backup plan ready to use could actually be the make-you-or-break-you point. Why? Because life is unpredictable.

Just because we see so many copywriters and creative entrepreneurs succeed in their work, it doesn’t mean that if we follow the exact same path we will get the exact same results. There are millions of factors that have contributed to their success, starting with all the hard work and the little choices that they have made in order to land their dream goal.

We will never find out how dark the road was before reaching any kind of celebrity status. We will never be able to walk into their shoes. We will never know what they had to give up so we can admire them today. We only see the top of the iceberg, not the struggles or the injuries.