If you’re not Quitting, not Pivoting, and Consistency isn’t the Problem — What do you actually do?
Last weekend I took the time to review some of my own articles.
It’s something I do as a way of keeping myself accountable and also helps with future direction. But I hadn’t done it for a few months.
What I found caught me off guard.
It was a little painful but highly instructive. Like when you finally get your results back from a test you took and you got a B when you were expecting an A+.
I realised I had been writing the same piece over and over again without fully being aware of it.
I came at it from different angles but the underlying idea of “building something slowly on the side” was identical, as if I was circling it without ever actually moving through it.
It felt like progress because I was writing and publishing. But if I’m brutally honest the last few months have not been my best.
The frustrating this is that I ran into a similar dynamic on Youtube 2 years ago but from a different angle.
I started with a narrow niche, stayed within it, and tried to build momentum by keeping myself strictly within these limits. And it worked. Views and subscribers came…but a year in, I had lost interest in the topic and felt like I had said everything there was to say on it.
So I tried to pivot. I gave myself six months to shift towards what I was actually interested in thinking and talking about.
The response was immediate. Over the next 6 months I lost 90% of my distribution. It was like exponential decline and that experience forced a difficult realisation.
If you don’t quit, and you don’t pivot, and simply continuing to produce more of the same is not the answer, then what exactly are you supposed to do with your work over time?
Is your expression translating?
The first thing to say is that you need to review your work regularly.
Don’t wait until something feels off. Do this deliberately, at set intervals. For me, that’s roughly every three months, long enough for patterns to form and short enough that you can still do something about them.
One key action I am taking off the back of this is a rebrand and repositioning of my newsletter (I’ll go into more detail in either next week or the week after next.)
But before you sit down and start reading and re-reading your work back, there is a more important question to answer.
What exactly should you be you looking for?
Because without that, you will default to surface-level judgments. You will decide that something is “good” or “bad,” based on your mood. You will find things you like and don’t like, and you will miss the only thing that actually matters.
What your work is doing over time.
If you step back and look at most writing advice, it tends to focus on surface behaviour. Choose a niche. Write consistently. Keep showing up.
All of that has its place, but it doesn’t explain why so many people can follow it closely and still feel like nothing is actually building.
It’s critical to understand that there are phases of development that we all go through.
There is the experimental phase which is expansive. You’re learning how to write and build some habits.
Then there is the shift to accumulation and progress. This is restrictive. What matters here is your goal, direction and positioning. That shift is rarely made consciously, which is why so many people stay stuck in a pattern that looks productive but never quite moves forward.
So I want to share my thought process on reviewing your own writing and which important conclusion to draw from it.
I am making at least 3 changes to my own work that come directly out of this realisation.
They are simple, but they change the structure of everything that follows.
Before making changes you must understand which stage you are in.
1. The first 6 months are for you, not your readers
I say 6 months as a loose guide but it can be les it can be a lot more. This is the beginner phase and my take on what you should do here goes against every marketing guru and business book out there. So take it with a pinch of salt.
Most people try to impose structure on their writing too early, because that is what the experts say…what no one tells you is that this advice is not wrong its just not for beginners.
At the beginning you don’t yet know how you think on the page. You don’t know what holds your attention long enough to be developed. You don’t know which ideas you can sustain for years to come. You don’t know what your natural rhythm looks like, or how your thinking behaves when it is given space.
All of that has to be discovered.
If you skip that stage, you end up building structure on top of borrowed assumptions. You follow what works for other people, you stay close to ideas that are already validated, and you begin to optimise before you have anything that is truly your own.
The first six months should be about you. Your own internal goals, your thought process, your writing. It might sound selfish, but it has to serve you before it can serve anyone else.
What do you want to write about?
What is interesting to you?
How do you feel when you write?
Do you want to publish this or not?
These are the questions to ask yourself repeatedly in the beginning.
This might sound like a red flag to you. It’s very much the antithesis of what every marketing and business book will tell you. Believe me I’ve read quite a few.
They are unanimous in their advice that you must constantly be thinking of your target audience.
Customer avatar - Who are you writing for?
Agitate pain-points - How are you providing value?
Sell the solution - What problem are you trying to solve?
Let’s stop the broken record and change track. This is fundamentally the wrong approach for beginners.
As a beginner you want to experiment and follow your own curiosity as much as possible.
You want to try stuff and see how it makes you feel. If you can’t evoke emotion in yourself how can you do that for your reader?
If something gets results but leaves you feeling stressed and anxious - that’s not sustainable.
By constantly focusing on a customer avatar or trying to write about an arbitrary problem that the market tells you is profitable you loose your edge. You constrain yourself to fit into a box. You narrow your focus, you limit your potential and 99% of people who take this approach end up quitting within 6 months of starting.
If you are in the early stages stop strategising. Start internalising.
Once you have enough volume behind you, something shifts.
That is when the work stops being exploratory. And that is where most people make the mistake of continuing in exactly the same way.
2. I’m begging you, Prioritise clarity
This is where the majority of online advice becomes actively misleading.
“If you are not experiencing growth -force it! Write more. Post more. Engage more. Keep showing up and you give yourself no other option than to succeed.”
The assumption is that more output will eventually lead to clarity, growth, and traction.
This may work for some. If you’re brand is all about growth, then you kind of have to spread this message.
Anything else would be bad for business which is why you never hear a simple sentence like “take a step back” from any of the growth gurus.
A few years ago I had fixed myself into a narrow niche on Youtube, because, well that was the dominant advice at the time. I tried to pivot out of it but failed miserably. After trying very hard for over 6 months I took a step back. It was the only logical thing for me to do. I stopped publishing for a couple of months to give myself some time to think and work out what my next move should be.
I used that time to write, plan and record videos in isolation. No audience feedback. No “what would you like me to make next”. I regrouped and re-centred on what it was that I really felt called to put out.
In the beginning there is no pressure, no expectations, you are free and uninhibited to do whatever you want, that is the raw power the beginner has.
However this changes once you have been producing for several months. The audience or readership is a new aspect, but not only that. If you are working from the same set of ideas, at the same level of thinking, then writing more simply produces more of the same.
Most people never fix this. They keep writing, keep publishing, keep circling the same ideas, convinced that “consistency” will eventually break the pattern.
But it never does. It just reinforces it.
When I get stuck or feel myself stagnating, this is the process I follow to regain direction….