There’s a part of success almost nobody talks about: sustaining something for a long time is hard. And I don’t mean it in the romantic sense of “you have to fight for your dreams”, but in the most boring, everyday sense of the word. There are days when you don’t feel like it, results take longer than you expected, you publish something that took you hours and three people see it (one of them your mom 🙃), and what used to excite you starts to feel like an obligation.
This happens a lot with content creation. You’ve surely seen creators you followed who stopped posting from one moment to the next. People with good ideas, talent, charisma, and knowledge who simply disappeared. And it wasn’t because they were bad or because “the algorithm punished them”: a lot of the time they disappeared because sustaining something just to please others is exhausting.
People can hand you the formula a thousand times: post every day, use this hook, jump on this trend, optimize for the algorithm, measure this and repeat. All of that can help, sure. The problem is that no formula replaces internal motivation.
It’s like going to the gym. You can buy the protein, the clothes, the membership, the perfect routine, and even the watch that tracks everything, but if you hate every second of the process, sooner or later you’re going to quit. It’s the same with content: you can learn to write better posts, edit better videos, and understand the platforms better, but if you don’t find real satisfaction in what you’re doing, everything starts going downhill.
And I’m not saying this from a place of superiority, because I’ve fallen into that trap too. You start something out of curiosity, out of wanting to share or explore an idea, and little by little external validation creeps in: what if nobody likes this, what if it doesn’t get enough likes, what if the algorithm doesn’t show it, what if I should be doing something else. Before you realize it, you’re no longer creating from curiosity but from anxiety, and that’s when everything gets heavy.
That’s why, over time, I try to always come back to a very simple idea: making things for myself first.
Careful, it doesn’t mean ignoring the audience, or not listening to feedback, or making incomprehensible content because “well, I like it”. It means the main engine can’t be external validation, because external validation is unstable: sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it comes late, and sometimes it comes for reasons you don’t even understand. Something you made in five minutes can work better than something you prepared for weeks, and if your only reason to keep going depends on that, you’re in trouble.
On the other hand, when you make something for yourself, the minimum result already has value. If I put together a course to learn a topic better, I already gained something even if nobody buys it. If I make a tutorial to organize an idea, or a stream to explore a problem, or a side project out of pure curiosity, the worst that can happen is that I’m the only one who likes it. And if I made it for myself from the start, then it wasn’t a loss.
I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to sustain certain projects for so long: courses, tutorials, streams, mentorships, communities. Not always with the same intensity or in a perfect way, but always with the same underlying intention: to learn something, understand something, explain something, or build something I’d also like to find out there. When something is born from that place, it’s easier to sustain. Not because it stops being hard (there’s still exhaustion, frustration, doubt, and comparison), but because the difficulty feels different when the process is also yours.
So before asking yourself whether something is going to work, maybe it’s worth asking yourself a different question: if this doesn’t get the attention I expect, would it still make sense to do it? If the answer is no, you might be building something too fragile. If the answer is yes, you have a much more solid foundation.
Making things for yourself doesn’t guarantee success, but it greatly raises the odds of lasting long enough to get a real shot.
