You've been climbing this mountain forever.
After what feels like eons, you're still not at the top. You've made it 90% of the way.
Sure, you're close, but 90% is still 90%. It's not 100%. It's not the summit.
And there's one big problem:
There's no path to the summit from where you are.
What do you do?
Give up? Cry? Complain? Sit in the snow and contemplate your life decisions?
No. Not if you want to reach the summit.
If you want to get to the top of the mountain, you must climb back down.
But I climbed so far...
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
—Winston Churchill
I know you've had this feeling before.
That feeling of losing everything you worked so hard for. You came so far.
For what? Just to lose it all?
Surely this isn't reality, right? That I climbed so far only to find myself at a dead-end? At a spot that allows me to go no further?
Welcome to the game. Life isn't fair.
Just because you worked hard for a while doesn't guarantee the summit.
Sometimes you just get unlucky with the path you pick.
And that's exactly what I experienced with my first business.
I was so excited when I first launched my ghostwriting agency.
I immediately started pounding the pavement for clients. Cold emails. Cold DMs. Straight up asking people from my church if they knew anyone who matched my customer profile.
It was all so much fun, putting myself out there.
And six months in, I landed my first big client!
Woohoo!
And then... Nothing.
Everything screeched to a agonizingly lethargic crawl.
After offboarding that big client (my agency was project-based, not retainer—another big mistake), I slowed down big time.
Sending DMs was a chore. I barely managed to force myself to send 10 a day. After a couple weeks passed, I'd have over a hundred new leads.
Any response?
Nope. Just crickets.
But that silence turned out to be a good thing.
It gave me a chance to reflect on where my business was headed.
And that's when I realized that none of this was sustainable.
Why?
- It wasn't scalable: My main value proposition was that my deliverable included no AI slop. So it had to be written by a human.
- It wasn't fundable: Since I needed the work to be done by a human, that had to be me. I didn't have the capital to hire.
- It wasn't enjoyable: I wasn't enjoying the client work. (And no, I'm not expecting business to be all fun and games. It just wasn't the kind of hard I was looking for.)
There was no path to the top.
But I refused to see that. Because I was too proud of the progress I had made.
Too proud to let go of what I was doing and to move onto something new.
And so my inability to swallow my pride caused my business to sputter along for another six months until I finally shut it down.
Six months wasted. Six months gone. Six months I'll never get back.
But those six months told me what I should have done instead.
Those six months taught me a lesson I'll never forget.
Finding another path
The greatest artists and creators have this ability to start over that nobody else does.
—Naval Ravikant
When you feel like you're about to lose everything you worked so hard for, here's what you do:
Accept it. Climb back down the mountain.
I know. It's tough.
But there's no other way.
Yes, you have to "discard" all your progress.
But you shouldn't think of it like that. "Discarding," that is.
Besides, how would you have known that that WASN'T the correct path unless you hadn't taken it? How would you have confirmed that was the "wrong" path?
Life is not a one-sided die that lands the desired outcome on the first roll.
If that were the case, you'd pick a path up the mountain and get to the top on your first try.
And it's not all bad. Think about all the knowledge you picked up along the way. The lessons you learned. The people you met. The new opportunities you took that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise—had you not taken the "wrong" path.
Were those not of any value to you? Were they worthless?
Not at all.
In fact, they were priceless.
They were necessary.
Without them, you wouldn't have been forced to climb back down the mountain. You wouldn't have reached the summit in the way that you did, struggling, guessing, and course-correcting all the way: failure after failure, lesson after lesson, pivot after pivot.
There's nothing meaningful about reaching the summit off rip.
But there is something meaningful about getting there after many, many failures.
I'm in that position myself right now.
I was partway up the mountain, realized there was no way to the top, and I climbed back down.
On the way down, I saw an interesting path. One that I hadn't climbed before. So I decided to take it. To start something new.
It's probably not the path to the top, but that's okay.
I know one of these paths leads to the top.
Eventually, I'll make my way up there.
And I'm sure you will, too.