This one doesn't have to be better than the last one

One of my favorite photos during our family camping trip this past week. #tuff

I sat down to write this letter and immediately felt the pressure.

Not the good kind. The dumb kind. The kind that whispers, "Okay, but last week's was really good. People replied. People said nice things. So this one better be better. Funnier. Deeper. Tug a little harder on the heartstrings."

And you know what that voice does? It freezes you. I sat there like a painter staring at a blank canvas, cursor blinking, absolutely certain that whatever I wrote next had to top the thing before it. And when you're convinced the next thing has to be your best thing, the easiest move in the world is to just not make the thing at all.

So let's talk about that, because I don't think it's just me.

One of my close friends and clients is a YouTuber with over a million subscribers. We edit his weekly videos, the ones that get seen by millions of people. So I've had a front-row seat to that world for years.

And here's what I've watched happen, especially over the last couple of years. A lot of people quit. People who built huge followings during COVID, during the whole everybody-quit-their-job-and-chased-something-meaningful stretch. Big channels. Real audiences. Gone.

Not because they ran out of talent. Because they ran out of gas trying to outdo themselves. The whole culture of that world runs on one exhausting idea: every video has to beat the last video. More views, bigger thumbnail, wilder hook. And if you actually build your entire model on outperforming your previous best, forever, you will burn out. It's not a maybe. It's just math.

I remember telling my friend, over and over, that consistency is the actual game. Not escalation. Your newest thing does not have to beat your last thing. Your people already like you. That's why they're there. They didn't subscribe to a leaderboard, they subscribed to you.

It's like friendship, honestly. Your friends don't need you to be measurably more impressive every time they see you. Maybe a little wiser over the years, sure. But mostly they just want you to show up and be you. The bar is presence, not personal records.

Real easy advice to give. Apparently much harder to take, based on how I started this letter.

Which brings me to the podcast.

I just recorded my 500th episode. It'll come out in a few weeks.

I have to laugh, because I still remember labeling the very first one "001" ten years ago and thinking, "Cute. Like I'll ever hit triple digits. Like I'll ever crack a hundred of these." And here I am at 500, having put out an episode every single week for a decade. It stopped being a project a long time ago. It's just part of who I am now.

But I'd be lying if I said it always felt worth it. There were stretches, plenty of them, where I wondered if anyone was even listening. My numbers aren't viral-YouTuber numbers. Not close. And there's no clean revenue story there either. I've had sponsors here and there, which was lovely, but for most of those ten years the show has not been a moneymaker.

A couple of years ago at a retreat for my mastermind, I actually said this out loud. I complained about the podcast. Told the room the numbers were embarrassing next to the million-subscriber creators I follow, and that I kind of wished I'd started a YouTube channel back then instead of some little audio show.

And one of the guys stopped me.

He said, more or less, "The whole reason I've stuck with this mastermind for years is your podcast."

Then he said something I've thought about ever since. He said so many of the "experts" in our space are running a marketing playbook more than an actual business. A lot of them figured out years ago that there's more money in teaching people how to grow a production company than there is in running one, so they quietly got out of the craft and into selling the dream of it. False scarcity. Countdown timers. "Only three spots left." All performance. And the icky part is how genuine they manage to look while doing it. "But you," he said, "you're still actually doing the work. You show up every week with your real personality, you let people into the messy parts, you admit the business isn't perfect and your life isn't perfect, and you keep going anyway. That's why I trust you."

I kind of sat there.

Now, I want to be fair here, because I'm not innocent. I use urgency too.

I'll put a real deadline on something. I'll tell you there are only so many seats. Because the truth is most of us are so buried under options and noise and all the things that a nudge is genuinely a kindness. If a little pressure helps you finally do the thing you already knew you wanted to do, good. I'll happily be the guy who kicks you in the butt.

But here's my one rule: it has to be true. Real deadline. Real cap. Real reason. The second the scarcity is invented, a fake timer that resets when you reload the page, a spot count that never actually runs out, it stops being a wake-up call and turns into a con. That's the line for me.

Use the pressure to tell the truth louder. Never to tell a lie faster.

That's the difference between the folks my friend was talking about and, I hope, me. It's not that they sell and I don't. We both sell. It's that somewhere along the way they started selling the map instead of walking the territory, and they stopped caring whether the urgency was real. I'm still out here walking it. Still in production. Still figuring it out in public. And I'd rather lose the sale than manufacture a reason for you to make it.

Anyway. Back to where I started, because I teach this stuff and here I was falling for it.

I stand on my little soapbox about how showing up consistently is how you build trust, how your story is the strategy, all of it. And that mastermind moment was living proof that I'd been quietly taking my own medicine for ten years without fully clocking it. Those 500 episodes, most of them ostensibly about my guests, were also just me, letting people into my world one week at a time. The low numbers weren't the failure. The consistency was the whole point.

So now it's 2026, and I've got this newsletter, and I'm showing up on social talking about business and life and all of it. And I'm watching the same thing happen in slow motion. The trust builds. The replies come. People tell me these letters matter to them.

And then, apparently, my brain takes that lovely encouragement and weaponizes it into "great, now do it better."

Nope. Not doing that.

Here's what I'm choosing to remember instead, and maybe you need to hear it too. Being better isn't the assignment. Showing up is. Some of what I make will be a banger. Some of it will just be what it is, a check-in, a "hey, I'm still here, I don't have anything earth-shattering today but I didn't want to disappear on you." And that is completely, totally enough.

The reflection itself is the gift. Sitting down each week to ask what I'm learning, where I'm growing, what's going well, what's absolutely not. It's been more therapeutic than I expected. And I only get that because I keep showing up, not because any single week clears the last one.

So this is my nudge to you. Keep showing up for your people. Keep showing up for yourself. Let some of it be brilliant and let the rest just be honest. And if you ever feel behind next to the loud, polished folks who are clearly playing the game, remember most of them stopped doing the actual work a long time ago. You didn't. That counts for more than you think.

That's the whole thing. That's how it compounds.

Grateful for you, Ryan

P.S. I've been reading The Great Mental Models and loving it. It's a collection of thinking tools for looking at a problem from more than one angle, and it's genuinely useful. My friend Mark gave me the good caveat, though: a mental model is a tool, not the driver. It can hand you a fresh perspective, but it can't replace the intuition and gut and heart you're actually made of. Use the models to think. Don't let them think for you. If you want to check it out, here's my link — and it's STILL 50% off.

P.P.S. Episode 500 drops in a few weeks. Ten years, every single week, and somehow I'm more into it now than when I started. Consistency's funny like that.