The Tenacity Audit
When effort becomes camouflage
Subscriber one was me.
September 13th, 2025.
I know because the graph starts there.
A flat line that barely moved through October.
A small climb into November.
A push through early December.
Then Christmas week.
The grandsons came to stay.
A whole week of building the traditions I grew up with, the ones I want them to carry forward.
The early mornings still happened. The build does not take holidays. But the days belonged to them.
What broke was everything else.
What Performing Tenacity Looks Like
I published on Christmas Day.
December 27th too.
Twelve pieces in January.
Three a week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Two to three Notes a day on top of that.
The archive says I showed up.
So when January went flat, I could not point to the obvious thing.
I had not quit.
I had not gone dark.
The output was running at full pace.
The readers who had started engaging, the ones leaving real comments, asking real questions, the early connectors who had started to matter, went unanswered.
Not ignored intentionally.
I did not have the bandwidth.
The job was running full speed. The content schedule had no off switch. By the time I closed the laptop each night, there was nothing left for the replies that would have made any of it compound.
When you are building an audience from zero, that response loop is not decoration.
It is the work.
Readers become regulars.
Regulars bring others.
The graph picked it up before I did.
Subscriber growth, which had started climbing in early December, flattened. Twelve pieces published in January. Engagement dropping with every one.
And then I did what a lot of smart people do when the numbers stop moving.
I went analytical.
Rebuilt the Notion content system.
Reorganized the calendar.
Made it cleaner, better linked, more structured.
Spent real hours on it.
At the end of that stretch the system was better.
The engagement was not.
Nothing I built in Notion put a single new reader in front of the work.
Then research mode.
How to grow on Substack.
What the platform rewards.
What the algorithm responds to.
Read essays.
Saved frameworks.
Took notes.
All of it felt responsible.
All of it felt like forward motion.
It was not.
I was hiding in plain sight.
One of my early sales mentors told me something I have never forgotten:
Slack off for a week, you will have a bad month shortly down the road.
He was describing pipeline.
He was also describing exactly what the graph showed me in January.
I had not stopped publishing.
I had stopped connecting.
And when the metrics reflected that, I optimized the container instead of refilling it.
That is performing tenacity.
The visible commitment stays intact.
The invisible work gets buried.
Then you spend your sessions doing things that look like building instead of things that actually build.
If you know someone putting in the hours and watching nothing move, send them this. It is not about working harder. It is about which version of the work you are actually doing.
How I Know the Difference Now
I was not always a salesperson.
I spent my career on the tech side of the house. Operations.
When we got back into hospitality, the plan was that I would head up the technical side of the project.
Days before we took the Virginia territory, the salesman who was supposed to lead the effort had a life-threatening emergency.
I was thrust into the sales role out of necessity.
No transition.
No ramp.
The territory was mine and I had no idea what I was doing.
There was no preparation time.
I had to go do it.
Get in front of restaurant owners.
Make the calls.
Show up to appointments.
Get my ass handed to me and go back the next day.
Clarity about whether I could do it did not come from research.
It did not come from reorganizing my approach.
It came from doing it badly in front of people until I started doing it less badly.
Months later I attended a Jeffrey Gitomer sales workshop and it sharpened everything.
But that sharpening only worked because I had reps underneath it.
The workshop had something to work with.
January was the opposite.
I had the hours.
The commitment.
The desk.
The coffee.
The blocks of time.
What I was missing was the willingness to do it badly in public again.
To publish the note that was not ready.
To answer comments even when I did not have anything polished to say.
To stay visible when visibility felt risky.
Instead I retreated into preparation.
Because preparation feels like tenacity and is not.