It's magic that anything works at all
A grounded, honest essay about managing disappointment in the creative life, and why success often depends on your ability to keep going when things fall apart.
Hi,
It’s a quiet kind of miracle when something actually makes it out into the world. You push this fragile, too-big dream through the clogged gears of life, and for some reason, sometimes, it works.
Those moments matter. They keep you going.
But they don’t tell the whole story…because the longer you stay in this business, whether you’re writing emails building a social community, launching, or trying to keep any creative machine running, the more likely you are to wake up disappointed by something. Something will have slipped through the cracks. Someone will have let you down. A thing you thought was solid will start to shake.
Every time you meet someone new, sign on for a project, release a product, or even move something one step forward, there’s a chance it won’t go how you hoped. And over time, the chances stack up. So do the little heartbreaks.
At the beginning, you feel the weight of not enough. Not enough work, not enough sales, not enough attention. That’s its own kind of pain. But when things finally pick up, the pain shifts. Now it’s about watching some of those yeses fall apart.
By year one, you’ve got a few stories that didn’t sell. Maybe a newsletter you forgot to update. A collaborator who flaked.
By year three, you’ve got a graveyard of unfinished projects, a pile of polite “no thank you” emails, and probably a few more scars than you expected.
By year five or ten, the numbers are bigger. More projects that never saw daylight. More people who never responded. More money spent on ideas that didn’t convert. More emotional investments that never paid off.
I currently have hundreds of paid members and tens of thousands of subscribers, and every single day people unsubscribe and end their subscription. Every day people don’t buy my work.
Way more people don’t buy my work every day than do, and all of that is a chance to be disappointed.
If you’ve been doing this for five or ten years, you’ve probably been part of dozens, maybe hundreds, of creative starts. Each one held a bit of your hope. Each one had a shot at becoming something real. And most of them didn’t.
That’s the job.
It’s not just that projects fall apart. People do, too. Everyone you meet and love and trust will eventually disappoint you in some small, or not so small, way. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes it’s just bad timing. But every relationship you build carries the possibility of letdown. That doesn’t mean you should stop building them. It just means you need a strong stomach.
Most of the time, people don’t mean to let you down. It’s not malice. It’s just life. Deadlines slip. Emails get buried. Priorities shift.
Sometimes the person who vanished on you was dealing with a sick kid, or burnout, or a full-time job that ate them alive. Other times, they were simply overwhelmed.
That doesn’t make the disappointment hurt less, but it does make it easier to carry. And that’s what you must do, carry it.
When you realize that most of this isn’t personal, it becomes something you can work around instead of something that breaks your faith in people.
If you go looking for disappointment, you’ll find it. Every time. You won’t have to look hard.
What matters is fact that anything survives the gauntlet of creation is enough reason to keep going. The fact that work get finished, campaigns fund, communities form, and magic slips through despite everything, that’s the miracle.
And once you understand that, you stop chasing perfection, stop measuring yourself by what didn’t happen, and start seeing the quiet success in every step that did move forward.
If you’ve been disappointed lately, maybe you’re not stuck. Maybe you’re leveling up. Maybe you’re finally learning what every long-term creator figures out eventually:
Success isn’t about avoiding disappointment. It’s about learning to move forward anyway.
You can’t dwell on the things that failed. You have to hold tight to the ones that somehow didn’t.
Because those few that make it? They’re the reason you started this in the first place.
The only people who don’t have these stories are the ones who quit. The rest of us carry them. Some days they feel like baggage. Some days they feel like armor.
That part depends on you.
The key is not to build a wall out of disappointment, but a platform. Something you can stand on. Something solid enough to lift you to the next step. Because there is a next step. There always is.
This is the part they don’t talk about in most creative advice. The slow, gritty part where you learn how to live with the emotional fallout of your own ambition.
Because ambition hurts.
It hurts when you care deeply. When you pour your soul into a launch and get ten sales. When you send out your best pitch and it goes ignored. When a collaborator says they love your work and then vanishes.
The pain is real. But it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
It just means you’re doing it.
Keeping going means holding disappointment in one hand and possibility in the other. It means knowing how to grieve a thing that failed without letting it take your voice. It means being stubborn enough to try again, and again, even when you feel like a fool for believing.
If you’re still showing up, you’re winning. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.
It’s easy to romanticize the creative life. What’s harder is recognizing that the real work is often emotional, not just tactical.
The real work is:
Holding yourself together after a launch tanks
Continuing to create while nobody’s watching
Making the next thing while still bleeding from the last one
Nobody claps for this part. There are no awards for resilience.
But if you learn how to navigate disappointment and how to keep showing up even when it sucks, then you become unstoppable.
Because in the end, it’s not about perfect outcomes. It’s about staying in the game long enough to give magic a chance to find you again.
And it will.
Success, real success, is often boring. It’s slow. It’s built in the gaps between disappointments. It’s earned through repetition, stubbornness, and the occasional flash of magic.
And when it shows up and something actually works, it will feel like lightning. Not because you didn’t earn it, but because you kept going long enough to receive it.
So if you’re tired right now, if you’re bruised and bitter and wondering if it’s worth it, this is the part where you decide to keep going.
Because sometimes, things do work.
And that’s enough.
Hold tight to that.
