Break through a ceiling. Turn it into a floor.
How entrepreneurs move to the next level by finding structural weakpoints, focusing energy strategically, and stabilizing long-term success.
Hi,
When I first started my career, everything felt exponential.
Every show I tabled at, I met more people. Everything I put out, I doubled my audience. Every launch seemed bigger than the last. It was a rush.
And like most new entrepreneurs, I assumed the curve would just keep going up forever.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Eventually, I started seeing the same people at shows, and now I was a known commodity. People had made opinions about me, and many of them not positive.
Yes, I could level up my shows to reach new markets, but eventually if you’re doing the biggest show in a market, then you essentially cap out at the people you can meet there.
You can still work hard. You can still ship. You can still post on social media, buy ads, do all the things. But the returns flatten out. What used to be exponential suddenly becomes logarithmic. The curve bends, and you hit a ceiling.
And when you’re in it, it feels awful. You start asking yourself: “Why isn’t this working anymore? What am I doing wrong?”
But you didn’t do anything wrong. This is just how growth works.
Every level has a ceiling.
The mistake I see most entrepreneurs make is that when they hit a ceiling, they think the way to break through is to press harder. So they keep doing what they’re already doing, just more of it.
More products. More ads. More posts. More everything.
That’s pressing the balloon down on a bed of nails. You can put your whole weight into it, but nothing happens. Because the pressure is spread out across too many points.
A balloon doesn’t pop that way.
But press it against one needle, one pinprick? Pop.
That’s the secret to breaking through ceilings. Not by doing more of everything. By finding the weak point and pouring all your energy into it until it bursts.
Every ceiling has its own collection of weak points:
Visibility. Maybe you need to be seen with the right people. Your work is good, but nobody in the next tier even knows who you are.
Legitimacy. Maybe you need a partner, an award, a review, something external that proves you belong.
Messaging. Maybe your work is too hard to explain, and you need someone who can sharpen the pitch so customers and gatekeepers actually get it.
Network. Maybe you need introductions, endorsements, or partnerships with people already living at the next level.
And most don’t stop to analyze it. They just keep doing what they’ve always done, wondering why they’re stuck.
For years, nobody in publishing took me seriously about Kickstarter. I could run campaigns, hit my numbers, show the receipts, and people would nod politely, then go back to ignoring me. It didn’t matter what I knew. From their perspective, I wasn’t credible.
I told Monica Leonelle that what I really needed was somebody like her to validate me with the industry. I don’t think she believed me at first. It sounded like ego, or maybe desperation.
But then the Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter book launched. And overnight, the same people who had written me off suddenly got very excited. Nothing about my expertise changed. What changed was legitimacy. Monica’s name on that book was the needle. It burst the balloon.
That’s how ceilings really work. You don’t break them by grinding harder. You break them by finding the weakpoint, the one needle that makes all the pressure count.
You only get 1–2 times a year to really leap your career forward, and the rest should be spent planning for or recovering from those moments and strategizing for the next one.
The launch isn’t just the launch. The launch is the culmination of lining things up, of knowing x, y, and z have to happen before they can break through the next ceiling, and strategically planning toward a singular point of effort where the structure is the weakest.
I’ve done this with anthologies and virtual summits, not necessarily to make money, but to build my network and push through to the next level.
Every breakthrough I’ve had came from finding a weakpoint and hammering it.
Monsters and Other Scary Shit and Cthulhu is Hard to Spell? Those weren’t about money. They were about network. 50-75 creators in an anthology = lots of audiences, lots of credibility, and lots of doors opened.
The virtual summits I ran? Those were about visibility. Thousands of new subscribers in a week. Suddenly people who’d never heard my name couldn’t ignore me.
Those co-written books gave me credibility and legitimacy with huge segments of the publishing ecosystem that didn’t give me the time of day before I wrote them.
None of those were accidents. They were strategic weakpoints. But that was just half the equation.
Busting through a ceiling wasn’t the win, not until I turned around and built the structure to turn it into my new floor.
You don’t only rise to the ceiling. You also fall to the floor.
This is the lesson that changed everything for me.
Breaking a ceiling feels incredible, but it’s temporary. A ceiling is just a breakthrough moment. A spike on the graph. A flash of attention.
A floor is permanent. A floor is the level you never fall beneath again.
If you don’t reinforce the new level, if you don’t stabilize, if you don’t put in the invisible work of hibernation, you fall right back through.
To keep building, it means doing the unglamorous, invisible work of stabilization:
Following up with people.
Recording podcasts.
Showing up in new communities.
Delivering on promises.
Strengthening relationships.
Building systems and infrastructure.
When I started breaking through to higher levels, it meant a lot more work under the radar. The ceiling I broke wasn’t automatically a floor. I had to make it one. And that meant catching up with people, putting myself on more shows, and doing the kind of behind-the-scenes labor nobody sees.
That’s why you only get one or two real shots a year to pool all your energy and break through a ceiling. That’s why you need to break through as many levels as you can with one go.
You spend most of your time reenforcing the floor. So, you have to make those moonshots count.
Here’s how this curve actually works:
Early career: exponential growth. Every move pays off.
Ceiling: growth flattens. Effort yields less.
Pinprick breakthrough: targeted move cracks the ceiling. Growth spikes.
Hibernation: reinforcement work turns the ceiling into a floor.
Repeat: exponential → logarithmic → breakthrough → floor.
That’s the loop.
If you understand where you are on the curve, you stop beating your head against the ceiling. You stop blaming yourself. You start looking for the weakpoint. And you plan your shot.
Every career has levels. Every level has a ceiling. Breaking through feels incredible, but it’s not the win. It’s just the opening.
The real win is what comes after, because you don’t rise to your ceiling. You fall to your floor.
And if you want to keep leveling up, you have to turn every ceiling you break into the new floor you stand on.
What do you think?
What’s the “weakpoint” holding you back right now and what would it look like to focus all your energy there instead of scattering it everywhere?
Have you ever had a moment where you thought you’d “leveled up” only to realize later you hadn’t reinforced it? What did you learn from falling back through?
Let us know in the comments.
