The flat line
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\The person who wins long term is almost never the person having the best week.
The episode that changed my podcast numbers came out on a Tuesday. Within forty-eight hours it had more downloads than anything I’d published in the previous six months. My inbox filled up. People were sharing clips I hadn’t even promoted. A guest I’d been trying to book for a year reached out to me. For about a week, I felt like I’d figured something out.
And then I coasted. Not on purpose. I didn’t decide to take my foot off the gas. But the high from that episode did something to my standards that I didn’t notice until weeks later. I prepped less for the next few interviews, because some part of my brain had decided I was in a groove. I got looser with my publishing schedule. I spent more time checking metrics and less time writing. By the time I snapped out of it, I’d lost about three weeks of real momentum and the audience growth had flattened out again.
The win cost me almost as much as a loss would have.
The spike problem
I used to think the danger in building something was the low periods. The bad months, the failed launches, the stretches where nothing seems to work and you question whether any of it matters. I’d prepared for those. I had routines for pushing through bad weeks, frameworks for getting back on track after a setback. I wrote a whole piece a few weeks ago about giving yourself fifteen minutes to grieve a bad moment and then resetting.
I had no framework for what happens after a good moment. And looking back, the good moments have derailed me just as often as the bad ones.
A big sponsorship deal closed and I relaxed on business development for a month, assuming more would come. A newsletter issue went viral and I spent the next week trying to reverse-engineer what worked instead of just writing the next one. Both times, the feeling of arrival did more damage than any setback, because my trajectory depends on treating every week like the work still matters.
The highs and the lows create the same problem: they pull you out of the work. On the low end, you tell yourself nothing matters. On the high end, you tell yourself you’ve made it. Both are lies, and both lead to the same place, which is a stretch of time where you’re operating below your baseline because something knocked you out of your rhythm.
