Consistency is highly overated
A perpetual lie
Challange update (Day 13)
Hello everyone,
It’s been a week since my last update on the challenge: reaching 1k followers on Substack in 30 days. Since then, I’ve published a few more notes and three threads.
As a result, I’ve gained 15 new email subscribers.
Not a huge number, but I’m still quite happy about it. Every single person matters. Before this initiative, my growth had stalled at zero for at least 2 to 3 months.
I’ll admit it could be a lot better, but this is my honest, unfiltered experience of trying to make it work.
So, how do I plan to turn things around in the remaining 17 days of this challenge?
Adapt, learn, evolve
It will be a series of breakthroughs that help me grow, not consistent averageness.
This will mainly happen through well-planned threads.
I also plan to publish more notes on Substack, a few long-form pieces, and normal content on X, but I’m not relying on those channels to drive growth.
People believe that simply posting and being consistent is the key to everything. But that’s a pipe dream.
It doesn’t work like that.
I wrote for almost two years on Medium and barely made ten bucks.
I wrote on X daily for two years and only reached 300 subs.
I studied marketing for three years straight without any results or even showing up.
Everything changed when I took radical risks, looked at the data, and chose a better new direction.
To be specific: instead of publishing another hundred articles on Medium, I made a profile on Upwork, used my articles as a portfolio, and within 15 days, landed a client making real money.
For X, instead of posting twice a day and leaving 200 comments like a headless chicken, I wrote one thread, gained 700,000 impressions, and earned 1,500 new followers.
And with marketing, it was only by working with clients that I finally got to apply what I had studied—and realized how little I actually knew.
In all of these cases, I could have listened to the "be consistent" crowd and hoped some miracle would change my fate.
But consistency alone is not enough. You have to learn from your attempts and improve.
That’s what I did.
And it got me further than I ever would have gone by just going through the motions.
So, what does this mean for my challenge?
Focus on what matters
All the things I’ve tried so far in the first two weeks brought some results, but I didn’t realize how much the thread landscape had changed on X.
You need to be highly attuned to what’s trending and what has the potential to blow up in order to write viral threads.
That wasn’t exactly the case six months ago when I wrote my first thread. Back then, you could get away with less effort per post. But now, you have to know what’s trending and how to capitalize on it.
To give you an example:
Before posting recently, I didn’t realize how much of a difference posting a video in the hook makes. But over the last 30 days, the number of threads I’ve seen blowing up with that format is bananas.
The main idea seems to be that clicking to view the video boosts your post by increasing both initial retention and click-through rate.
It might seem like a small thing, but when writing a thread, the hook is by far the most important part for going viral.
That’s why I plan to catch up on all the thread growth tactics and publish as many as I can over the next 16 days.
But there’s one more important issue: TIME.
The Number One Killer of Dreams
The most common issue people face when working on a personal project is a lack of time.
We all have responsibilities and priorities that need attention. In my case, it's daily client work, health management, and spending time with my family.
By the time I’ve solved a client’s issue, gone to the gym, prepped my meals, and taken a walk with my girlfriend, I might get a solid 60 to 90 minutes to work on this project.
That’s during the weekdays. On weekends, I can usually carve out more time.
Over the past two weeks, I haven’t managed my time that well, and a lot of random, time-consuming problems have come up.
So I plan to fix the time issue by being more rigorous with how I spend it and by making this project a morning priority.
Generally, if you wake up earlier to work on something, you benefit from the morning’s silence and have the time and focus to finish what matters.
To recap, here’s what I’ll focus on moving forward:
Make this project a priority in the morning
Research, draft, and publish as many threads as possible
Research, draft, and publish notes on Substack, then repurpose them on X
That’s the glorious plan in a nutshell. Now I’ll get back to stumbling toward the light.
Let’s see how far we can get in 17 days.
—Sebastian