You left before it worked.
Hey Reader,
I’m sitting at a cigar lounge with a buddy the other night. We’ve known each other eight years, both run YouTube channels, and we’re doing that thing where you trade the best advice you’ve gotten.
We landed on the same thing at the same time:
It’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great.
I’ve had to learn this lesson over and over again, and I still forget it constantly.
Part of why it’s so hard to remember is that we live in a world that only shows us occasionally great. Your feed is mind-blowing highlights. People at the absolute peak of their craft. And it’s easy to assume they’ve always been that way, that they just showed up talented and polished.
This newsletter is week 64. I haven’t missed a single Saturday. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really consider myself a writer. I got labeled dyslexic in grade school, underperformed on every essay in college, and chose YouTube specifically because I didn’t have to write.
But I committed to showing up every week, and some of those weeks I was genuinely embarrassed to hit send. Like hovering over the button thinking, “this is not it, and people are going to notice.”
I sent it anyway.
And when I go back and read what I was putting out a year ago compared to now, it’s not even close. Not because I had some breakthrough or took a writing course. Because I kept showing up on the weeks I didn’t feel like it.
Turns out that’s the whole game.
Same thing on YouTube. People ask me all the time how I got to almost 2 million subscribers, like there was one video or one strategy that changed everything.
They’re usually surprised to learn it’s been a one-man operation for 14 years. No massive team. I taught myself every single skill along the way, filming, editing, writing, all of it. And after 14 years you’d hope I’d be decent at some of it by now, but I still feel like I have such a long way to go. I can’t point to the moment it “worked” because it wasn’t a moment. It was a boring, unsexy streak that I just never stopped.
Consistently good.
Not occasionally great.
Here’s what I think happens with people like you and me. The thing that pulled us into self-improvement in the first place is that we’re achievers. Which means we have high standards. And common advice reinforces this: raise your standards, you’ll fall to the level of what you tolerate, all that stuff.
And that’s true in some contexts.
But the shadow side of it is where your standards get so high that they completely work against you. And then you don’t move forward at all, which is way worse than moving forward imperfectly.
The thing that makes you want to grow is the same thing that won’t let you be bad long enough to actually get good. Your standards kick in before your skill has a chance to catch up, and you walk away thinking it didn’t work when really you just didn’t give it long enough.
Think about the thing you’re best at right now.
Were you good at it when you started?
Were you even decent?
Probably not.
So why are you demanding that the new thing be good on day one?
You’ve probably got a graveyard of things you started and quit. Not because they weren’t working, but because they weren’t working fast enough.
The workout program you dropped after three weeks.
The journal you kept for nine days.
The creative project you abandoned because it felt amateur.
You just left before consistently good had a chance to do its thing.
Three hours at that cigar lounge and the only thing I’m still thinking about is the simplest advice.
The gap between you and the people you admire isn’t talent. It’s that they stayed in the game on the days it felt pointless. They sent the bad draft. They posted the mediocre video. They showed up on week 12 when everything inside them said quit.
Consistently good beats occasionally great.
Every single time.
See you next saturday,
CK
