When you’re working with leverage — digital media — most of your effort will feel like it’s going nowhere. You’ll put in hours, days, even months building something and watch it barely move the needle.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, one video, one article, one song takes off and does more for your growth than the last hundred combined.

That’s not failure — that’s a power law in action. The results are wildly uneven by nature. And if you expect progress to show up in a nice, tidy line, you’re going to burn out long before the payoff arrives.

The hard truth is this: you have to be willing to “waste” 99 attempts just to get to the 1 that changes everything. Here’s why that’s not just okay — but exactly how leveraged creativity is supposed to work.

Progress is nonlinear.

Since Tara and I started her YouTube channel a few weeks ago, we’ve racked up 12 subs, 8.3K views, and 41 hours of watch time. Now, at this pace - assuming linear growth - it’ll take over 6 years to crack 1,000 subs.

But progress in digital domains is nonlinear. You don’t grow a little every day. You grow a lot — suddenly.

We could get 50 subs from our first 100 sketches, then add 5,000 subs with our 101st sketch.

And this is the mistake most people make when they’re starting out. They assume their rate of growth will always be this slow, and they quit.

When really, you need to be able to go months (and sometimes years) with not much to show for your work… until something pops.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains this with a sand castle analogy. You build a sand castle, piling on grains of sand until… one more grain causes the whole thing to collapse. That one final input creates a disproportionate result. This is the essence of nonlinear progress.

Here’s what that means for you:

One of your creations will create more growth than ALL of our previous creations combined!

In our case, I suspect (we’ll see if I’m right) that a year from now, 75%+ of our subs will be from one video.

Human brains aren’t great at grasping this. For each unit of “work” we put in, we expect one unit of “success” to come out. But that’s not the reality at all. It’s power laws that determine growth in leveraged domains.

That’s why you have to keep creating and stay in the game…

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You have to keep playing to win.

One sketch is going to do more for Tara and me than all other sketches combined. The problem is, we don’t know which one! That’s why you have to make creative output a habit.

You have to play the game to have a chance to win. Each sketch is like a lottery ticket. The vast majority of sketches don’t pop. But if we make enough, over years, we are going to get a winner.

You can’t expect each piece of content to go viral. It won’t. Your job is to simply stay in the game.

And remember, when you do get a winner, it’s not because you “worked harder” on it than all the others. It has far more to do with luck, timing, platform push, and pure randomness — things you can’t predict.

And you increase your odds not by trying to “pick the winner,” but by showing up over and over. Eventually, the algorithm rolls in your favor — but only if you’re still publishing when it does.

Judging your entire creative worth on how one video performs is like quitting poker after a single hand. Stay in. Keep playing to win.

You only need to be right once.

The beautiful (and frustrating) truth of leveraged work is this: you only need one breakout moment to change everything.

But to find that moment, you’ll need to show up through 99 that don’t hit.

This isn’t just a hunch — it’s a mathematical pattern. It’s called a power law, where a small number of outcomes account for the vast majority of results.

Most of your creative output will feel like a waste. It’s not. It’s training. It’s compounding. And more than anything, it’s keeping you in the game long enough to catch a win.

So let go of instant gratification. Don’t look for quick payoffs. Just keep creating. The work that changes your life probably won’t feel any different when you hit publish. It’ll just be the right thing at the right time.

Start now.

-Thomas

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