The Big Moments Don’t Matter As Much As You Think
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You’re obsessing over the peak. The climb is where everything actually happens.
I hit 100 million podcast downloads last year. People sent congratulations. Someone made a graphic. My team posted about it. For about 48 hours, it felt like an event. A milestone. A moment.
Then it was Wednesday again and I had three episodes to record.
The weird thing about that milestone is that I can’t point to a single moment that caused it. There was no viral episode. No celebrity guest that changed everything overnight. No PR stunt. No growth hack. Just 1000 episodes published over six years. One at a time. Most of them to an audience that was smaller than I wanted it to be. Most of them on weeks when I didn’t feel like recording.
But the process was simple enough that even on those weeks, I’d open Riverside, send the guest a link, and we’d just talk. The recording took an hour. The transcripts, clips, and show notes were ready by the time I finished my coffee. On the weeks I didn’t feel like showing up, the simplicity of the process is what got me to show up anyway.
100 million downloads sounds like an event. It wasn’t. It was 312 weeks of showing up. And most of those weeks were boring.
I think about this constantly now. Because the more I look at how things actually get built, in business and in life, the more I see the same pattern: we overvalue the single big moment and dramatically undervalue the daily process that made the moment possible.
The Event Illusion
We’re wired to remember peaks. Graduations. Promotions. Launches. Engagements. The day the deal closed. The day the number hit. The moment the thing finally worked.
These are the stories we tell. “Let me tell you about the day everything changed.” The narrative demands a turning point. A before and after. A single event that explains the trajectory.
But that’s almost never how it actually works. The event didn’t cause the outcome. The event was the byproduct of a thousand invisible days that preceded it. The graduation didn’t make you educated. Four years of studying did. The event was just the ceremony. The promotion didn’t make you valuable. Three years of consistent work did. The promotion was just the recognition. The launch didn’t make the company. Eighteen months of building in obscurity did. The launch was just the announcement.
We celebrate the peak and forget the climb. But the climb is where everything happened.
I’ve interviewed over 800 founders, CEOs, and operators. I always ask some version of “what was the turning point?” Almost every single one gives me an event. The day they got their first customer. The day they raised funding. The day they went viral.
Then I ask the follow-up: “What were you doing in the two years before that moment?” And the answer is always the same. Grinding. Showing up. Doing the boring version of the work that nobody saw. Sending emails that didn’t get replies. Publishing content that nobody shared. Building features that nobody used yet. Making the same daily deposit, over and over, into something that hadn’t paid off yet.
The turning point wasn’t the event. The turning point was the decision to keep going during the 700 days before the event when nothing was happening.
The Tuesday Test
I’ve started applying something I call the Tuesday test. Not to my career. To everything.
If I want to understand what’s actually driving results in any area of my life, I don’t look at the big moments. I look at what I do on a random Tuesday. Because Tuesday is where your life actually lives. Not the peak. Not the milestone. Not the event. The boring, unremarkable, nobody-is-watching Tuesday.
What do you do on Tuesday for your health? Do you work out even when you don’t feel like it? Do you eat well when nobody’s keeping you accountable? Or do you only get motivated when January 1st rolls around and you sign up for a gym membership that you’ll use for three weeks?
What do you do on Tuesday for your relationships? Do you ask your partner how their day was and actually listen? Do you text the friend you haven’t talked to in a while? Or do you only show up for the events: the birthday dinners, the anniversaries, the big moments that feel important because they’re on the calendar?
What do you do on Tuesday for your career? Do you do the work that compounds even when nobody’s watching? Do you make the call, send the email, record the episode, write the newsletter? Or do you only perform when the stakes are visible?
Your Tuesdays determine your outcomes. Your events are just the scoreboard.
I realized this about my relationship with Gina. I used to think the important things were the trips. The proposal. The big gestures. And those things matter, I’m not dismissing them. But the actual foundation of our relationship is built on the boring stuff. The Tuesday night dinners where nothing special happens. The morning coffee where we just talk. The random Wednesday where she tells me something about her day and I actually pay attention instead of half-listening while I think about work.
The big moments feel like they matter more because they’re memorable. But the daily moments matter more because they’re the foundation that makes the big moments mean anything.
The Math Nobody Does
There are roughly 250 working days in a year. If you spend one hour per day on something that compounds, that’s 250 hours in a year. In five years, that’s 1,250 hours. At that point, you’re not just experienced. You’re in a different category than everyone who waited for the perfect moment to start.
Now compare that to events. A conference lasts two days. A launch lasts a week. A viral moment lasts 48 hours. Even if the event is incredible, even if it’s the best conference of your career or the biggest launch you’ve ever done, it’s a tiny fraction of the time you spend on the daily process.
But look at how people allocate their energy. They’ll spend months preparing for a single event. Obsessing over a launch. Stressing about a presentation. Planning the perfect moment. And they’ll neglect the daily process entirely. They’ll skip the Tuesday workout. They’ll coast through the Tuesday work. They’ll phone in the Tuesday conversation with their partner.
Then they wonder why the events don’t produce the results they expected. The launch flops because the daily work of building an audience was neglected. The conference doesn’t lead anywhere because the daily work of following up was skipped. The presentation doesn’t land because the daily work of getting better at communicating was ignored.
The event can’t save you from the process you skipped.
What the Best Do Differently
The pattern I see in the most successful people I’ve met isn’t that they have better events. Better launches. Bigger moments. It’s that their daily process is relentless.
Warren Buffett reads for five hours a day. Not because there’s a big presentation coming up. Because that’s what Tuesday looks like. Jerry Seinfeld wrote jokes every single day for decades. Not because he had a special coming up. Because the daily process of writing is what made the specials possible.
One founder I interviewed described his approach like this: “I don’t have goals. I have systems. A goal is an event you’re trying to reach. A system is a process you run every day. The system produces the events. Not the other way around.”
That stuck with me. Because I realized I’d been thinking about my own career backwards. I was setting goals (hit this download number, book this guest, reach this revenue milestone) and then scrambling to achieve them. But the downloads came from the daily process of publishing consistently. The guests came from the daily process of building relationships. The revenue came from the daily process of showing up and being useful.
The goals were just scorecards for the daily process. And when the process was right, the goals took care of themselves.
The Boring Middle
Nobody talks about the boring middle. The stretch between starting something and seeing results. The 200 episodes before anyone cares. The 18 months of writing before anyone subscribes. The two years of working out before your body actually changes. The five years of investing before the compound interest becomes visible.
The boring middle is where everyone quits. Because during the boring middle, the daily process feels pointless. You’re showing up. You’re doing the work. And nothing is happening. No events. No milestones. No peaks. Just Tuesday after Tuesday of effort that doesn’t seem to produce anything.
But it is producing something. You just can’t see it yet. The compound effect is real, but it operates on a delay. The results don’t show up in proportion to your daily effort. They show up later, all at once, in what looks like an overnight success but was actually 500 unremarkable Tuesdays.
I went through this with the podcast. For the first two years, nobody cared. I’d publish an episode and get 200 downloads. I’d interview someone I thought was fascinating and the episode would disappear into the void. There were weeks where I genuinely considered quitting. Not because I didn’t enjoy it. Because the daily process didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
But I kept recording. Kept publishing. Kept showing up on Tuesdays. Part of what kept me going was that Riverside turned a full production day into a Tuesday morning activity. Transcripts, clips, show notes were done before I closed my laptop. When the process is that simple, you’re more likely to survive the boring middle.
And then somewhere around year three, the curve bent. Not because of a single event. Because 150 episodes of consistent work had accumulated into something the algorithm noticed, something listeners trusted, something guests wanted to be part of. The compound effect kicked in. And everything that came after — the millions of downloads, the big guests, the business — was just the scoreboard catching up to the process.
The Process Is the Product
The reframe that changed everything for me: the daily process isn’t the path to the event. The daily process IS the thing.
Your health isn’t the race you run once a year. It’s the Tuesday workout. Your marriage isn’t the anniversary dinner. It’s the Wednesday morning conversation. Your career isn’t the promotion. It’s the daily work that made you undeniable.
When you internalize this, it changes what you optimize for. You stop optimizing for events and start optimizing for Tuesdays. You stop asking “how do I make this launch perfect?” and start asking “what does my daily process look like, and is it good enough to produce the outcomes I want eventually?”
This applies to content creation too. The creators who build the biggest audiences aren’t the ones who had one viral moment. They’re the ones who showed up every week for years. One recording at a time. One episode at a time. One post at a time. The daily process of creating, publishing, showing up.
I record every episode on Riverside because it made the daily process sustainable. What used to be a full production day became something I could do on a Tuesday morning without thinking about it. And when the process is easy enough to sustain, you sustain it. And when you sustain it long enough, the compound effect does the rest.
But Riverside isn’t the point. The point is that whatever your daily process is, in any area of your life, the question isn’t whether it’s exciting. The question is whether it’s sustainable. Because the process you can sustain for five years will always beat the process you burn out on in three months.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Hear
The daily process is boring. That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.
If your process were exciting, everyone would do it. The reason most people quit isn’t that the process is too hard. It’s that it’s too boring. There’s no drama. No event. No peak. Just the same thing, day after day, with no immediate feedback telling you it’s working.
Boring is the filter. It separates the people who are in it for the process from the people who are in it for the event. The people who just want the peak will quit during the boring middle. The people who can tolerate boring Tuesdays will still be standing when the compound effect finally kicks in.
I think about this with fitness. The people who stay in shape for decades don’t have dramatic workout routines. They do the same basic movements, three or four times a week, for years. It’s boring. Nobody’s filming it. Nobody’s applauding. But ten years of boring consistency produces results that no amount of intense-but-inconsistent effort can match.
I think about this with marriage. The couples who’ve been together for 40 years don’t describe their relationship as exciting. They describe it as steady. Present. Consistent. They show up for each other on the boring days. Not just the peaks.
I think about this with wealth. The people who actually build lasting wealth don’t make one brilliant investment. They save consistently, invest consistently, and let the compound effect work over decades. It’s boring. It’s not a story anyone wants to tell at a party. But it works.
Boring, sustained, consistent effort is the most powerful force in human achievement. And almost nobody can tolerate it.
What Changes When You Flip It
When you stop chasing events and start building processes, three things happen.
First, the pressure drops. You’re not trying to make every moment perfect. You’re not living or dying by the launch, the presentation, the big meeting. You’re just showing up for the process. If today’s session isn’t great, that’s fine. There’s tomorrow. And the day after. The process absorbs bad days in a way that events can’t.
Second, the results compound. Instead of lurching from event to event hoping each one moves the needle, you’re making daily deposits that accumulate silently. The results show up later, but they show up bigger and more durably than any single event could produce.
Third, you actually enjoy it more. When the process is the point, you’re not constantly anxious about outcomes. You’re not measuring every day against an impossible standard. You’re just doing the work. And there’s a deep satisfaction in the daily practice of something you care about that no event, no matter how big, can replicate.
I enjoy recording an episode on a random Tuesday morning more than I enjoyed hitting 100 million downloads. That sounds wrong. But it’s true. The milestone was a moment. The Tuesday morning is my actual life.
That Tuesday morning exists because I stripped the process down to its simplest form. Riverside handles the production. I just show up and have the conversation. When you remove the friction from the boring work, you actually do it.
Your Tuesday
I don’t know what you’re building. I don’t know what area of your life matters most to you right now. But I know this: whatever it is, the outcome will be determined by what you do on Tuesday. Not the big day. Not the launch. Not the event. Tuesday.
What does your Tuesday look like for your health? For your relationships? For your career? For the thing you keep saying you want to build?
If the answer is “nothing special,” that’s the problem. Not your lack of talent. Not your lack of opportunities. Not your lack of a big moment. Your Tuesdays aren’t good enough to produce the outcomes you want.
If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start creating content when you have the right setup, the right team, the right moment — that’s the event mindset talking. The process mindset says start this Tuesday. Riverside makes it one link and an hour. That’s a Tuesday you can sustain.
Fix the Tuesday. The events will take care of themselves.
100 million downloads wasn’t an event. It was 312 Tuesdays. And most of them were boring. And that’s exactly why they worked.
If you’re ready to make your Tuesday as simple as mine, try Riverside free. One link. Studio quality. Transcripts, clips, and show notes ready when you’re done. Start here.
Thank you for reading,
Scott
Sponsor: Riverside — Record studio-quality conversations from anywhere. One link. No downloads. AI handles the rest. Try Riverside free.