ABOUT THIS EPISODE
No articles today, just a candid, thinking-out-loud one. Matt names something he catches in himself: disappointment about the response he’s getting online, until he digs underneath it and finds his mind has raced three steps ahead and set an invisible standard of success that isn’t rooted in any real strategy. It’s a comparison he didn’t even know he was making, sometimes to an old-media model that’s gone (the daily talk show with millions of viewers is dead and buried), and sometimes to a YouTuber with five million followers. The neighbor has a Maserati and you have a Toyota, so surely you should have a Maserati. Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the point. The point is how much of your dissatisfaction is rooted in an expectation you never consciously chose.
His antidote is two words: aim small. Not small ambition, but a small, concentrated group of people who are genuinely all in on what you’re about. That’s how the bigger stage actually gets built. A hundred highly engaged people will change your life, and if each refers you to a handful, you’re at a thousand before long. In a world of too much of everything, the real danger is losing yourself in it and forgetting the next thing, the person in your immediate circle, the next step. Platforms will keep changing (AI is accelerating it), so if you build your identity around a platform instead of around who you serve, you can spend ten years chasing a stage that’s dead by the time you arrive. Serve your people first, and change mediums with them as they move. Matt’s honest that social media is both indispensable and dangerous, that it can quietly turn you into an unpaid worker unless you’re actually serving there, in which case you measure by whether people are getting value, not by likes. He points to his own steady, unforced Substack growth (the overall audience doubled over the year, still climbing, with almost nothing pushed) as proof that concentration beats chasing. His question: what are you expecting of yourself that you don’t even realize, and what does meaningful growth look like for you?
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