You're on a race track.
It's unimaginably wide. Lanes are laid out, left and right, as far as the eye can see. Each lane has a person, ready to run.
"On your mark." An announcer says.
You hear the deafening roar of millions of shoes touching the starting blocks as everyone crouches down. You do the same.
"Set."
Everyone coils up, hips in the air, ready to explode.
BANG!
And you're all off, running down the track.
But just one second in, people around you start collapsing onto the track.
You stop running to look around. No one is helping them!
Instinctively, you try stepping out of your lane to help the person closest to you—only to run into an invisible wall.
You try the other side of your lane. No luck. Another invisible wall.
And that's when you realize:
Everyone is running their own race. You can't help someone else run their race.
With no other choice, you start running again.
By now, hundreds of people are on the ground. And you haven't even gotten to the 10-meter mark.
Welcome to the game of making things.
If you want to create, you are going to fail
I know why you're reading this.
It's because you want to be a producer. You want to make things.
You know your life is meant for more than just consuming.
Your life is meant for more than just scrolling.
Your life is meant for more than just watching others win.
Your life is meant for more than just playing video games and earning virtual loot.
Deep down, you know you're a producer.
But the game of making things is not easy, whether it's entrepreneurship (making businesses), content creation (making content), or art (making something out of nothing).
Whatever your endeavor, the failure rate is incredibly high.
Most businesses fail. Most content creators stay invisible. Most artists never get paid.
But why?
Is it because the competition is so fierce? Is it because everyone else is so talented, hard-working, and persistent?
No. Not if the race track taught us anything.
Most people give up right away
In 2024, I started writing on X.
It was the first social media platform that I took growth on seriously. There was something magnetic about it. Connecting and growing with like-minded creators was a blast.
And like most small accounts, I created a list of other small accounts to engage with. So that we could grow together.
That list had over 100 accounts. Behind every account was a real person.
Behind every account was someone whose content I'd support, someone who I'd talked to in DMs, and most importantly, someone who told their story of how they got into the game.
I even met some of them face to face, over video calls, to talk business ideas, new offers, content systems.
You know how many are still active today? Still pumping out content?
I'll put it this way:
I can count the ones still left on one hand.
The people you thought you'd run with forever are the first ones to drop.
There's only one person on the race track
At the end of the day, you're still running a race.
And a race is a competition, right? So where is it? Where is the competition?
Well, I'll tell you where it's not, first. It's not the other runners.
There's virtually no competition from them. Most people drop out like flies, right from the starting gun.
And there are plenty of statistics to support this.
Take a look at these newsletter stats from Reletter's blog:
- Only 35% of newsletters make it to two issues
- The number of new Substacks has increased 23x since 2019
- Publishing 21 issues puts you in the top 5% of newsletter creators
The pattern here is clear.
Most newsletters are just passion projects spun up over a weekend. The product of someone who got "inspired" by a Dan Koe video, made a Substack account, wrote one edition, and quit.
Despite all those other people you see running alongside you, there's effectively only one person on the race track:
YOU.
You are the competition. You're racing yourself.
If the average person can't even manage to publish two newsletters, tweet once a day, or just stick with anything past week two, do you really think you need to be worried about external competition?
Of course not!
If most runners are collapsing before the 10-meter mark, for all intents and purposes, they're not even real.
Right now, you need to focus on your main competition: you.
Because there's a very real possibility that you don't even make it past the 10-meter mark. You're not immune to the laws of attrition.
Getting started is easy. But keeping on keeping on isn't.
But there's good news from all of this "one person on the race track" business.
And that's the fact that you're winning.
Since you're running right now, you're winning automatically.
And if "quit" isn't in your vocabulary, if "giving up" isn't a skill listed on your resume, if "tapping out" isn't a move you know, then you're still in the race.
If you're still in the race, you're already winning.
There's no way to lose if you don't give up.