If you’ve spent years building experience, you may have been in this situation.
You’re putting in the effort, you’re doing the work, and you’re showing up, delivering, thinking, refining.
And yet… nothing really changes.
At least, not in any meaningful way.
At first, it’s easy to explain away. You tell yourself:
“I just need to push a bit more.”
“I need to be more consistent.”
Or “I need to get in front of more people.”
So you do. You put in more effort, you tighten things up, and you try to do it better.
But it still feels like you’re on a treadmill – you’re moving but not really getting anywhere.
The Assumption
Then there’s that feeling that arises, that something’s not quite right. And you start hearing that nagging question: “Why isn’t this working the way it used to?”
And that question is uncomfortable, because the answer has always been more effort.
Most of us have been trained to believe that if something isn’t working, the solution is more effort.
We live in a world focused on productivity. It’s built on the belief that you can have anything you want as long as you work hard enough for it. In other words, if you don’t have it, you haven’t worked hard enough.
So when things aren’t working out the way they used to, you commit to working harder, to be more visible and more consistent. But this only works if you’re already pointed in the right direction.
The Shift
This is an important point that’s easy to miss: Where you’re pointing matters more than how hard you push.
You can apply more effort, refine your message, increase your visibility and work harder but still stay where you are.
It’s a bit like rowing. You can be pulling hard on the oar with strong strokes and good rhythm.
But if the boat is pointed in the wrong direction, all that effort just takes you further away from where you want to be.
The effort isn’t the problem, the direction is.
My Experience on YouTube
I remember a period where I was doing exactly this here on my YouTube channel.
I committed to publishing more and better-quality videos. So I spent more time researching, more time writing scripts, recorded multiple takes, spent longer editing, added music and sound effects and polished my thumbnails.
On the surface, it looked like progress. But underneath, nothing was really changing. It produced the same results, same outcomes, just more effort.
It didn’t feel like I was doing the wrong thing. Just that it wasn’t going anywhere, and that was draining.
Explaining What You Do
And I’ve seen this pattern in others, too.
Someone with years of experience is struggling to explain what they do. So they try to say it better. They spend time rewriting and refining. They choose better words and they polish the language. And they present it better, too.
But the problem isn’t how it’s being said or what it looks like.
It’s that something underneath hasn’t fully taken shape yet.
Growing Your Business
Another common example is someone trying to grow their business. The instinct is to increase their output. They put in more hours to produce more posts so they can show up more often and be seen by more people.
Yes, they are seen by more people, but nothing really sticks.
Because the direction hasn’t shifted, only the effort has.
The Problem with Activity
And that’s a tough pill to swallow, because effort takes, er, effort and energy and attention.
It also feels productive. It gives you something to do, something to improve, something to measure and something to point to.
And it also keeps you busy, but it makes it easy to avoid the deeper question.
And that response can keep you circling the same problem for a very long time.
A Different Question
If you’re not getting the results you want, it follows that it might be useful to ask a different question.
Instead of “What should I do next?”
Consider, “What am I actually pointing at?”
Because if that hasn’t shifted, then everything built on top of it won’t shift either.
And once you start to see that, something else becomes harder to ignore. That maybe the issue isn’t just the effort, or even the direction, but what you’re trying to express in the first place.
And that’s where things start to get interesting.
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