Three traits.

Stay curious about other people’s ideas. Stay non-defensive about your own ideas. Be patient with yourself.

Starting a series and inviting guests to contribute posts is not a new thing. It is not even a new thing on the internet. But for a content creator trying to amplify their online presence, especially as a novice, it absolutely feels new.

There are many things people take for granted that, however, happen for a reason. Today, I want to share the deeper reason why I started these new series.

As I said, there are already many successful publishers on Substack doing guest posts. You have probably seen them before, but they never really left a mark in your brain. In other words, there was no visceral desire underneath it. You did not yet have that deep “why” in your heart, so naturally there was no action following it.

If I pause and think carefully about the exact moment that small signal started shining in my brain, I think it was the moment I became genuinely curious about what other people were doing. Not curious about personal things, but deeply curious about why certain products became successful, why some founders could move the needle, and how they managed to get paid users.

There was no jealousy in between. Purely, purely curiosity. That curiosity started the entire journey.

You start noticing that every founder is different. Every one of them does one thing correctly in their own unique way, and you begin learning how to apply parts of that thinking yourself.

Competitor analysis is often the same story. The more you study competitors and dig into the “bad” reviews to understand where the friction is, the more you realize that sometimes you only need to do one thing better in a relatively unique way to create differentiation.

In other words, you need curiosity.

That is also the reason I started another series called “They Learned a Lesson.” I am extremely curious about why some products fail while others work.

Product A and Product B can exist in the same category, yet one fails silently while the other immediately gives you the impulse to try it. There are countless design decisions, psychological nuances, and positioning choices behind those outcomes.

Once you become curious about why a product does not work, you also begin learning from failure itself. That is the very root of why I wanted to start this series.

Besides curiosity, I think another trait that helped me grow here is becoming less defensive.

My bottom line is honestly pretty low, haha. As long as there is no personal attack, people can be extremely blunt and candid about my product or publication.

I can give two examples.

At the very beginning of launching, I reached out to someone and asked her to take a look at the product. She directly said, “No, I am not interested in building a product, and honestly I do not buy a single word what your landing page is saying.”

If it were me six months ago, I probably would have quietly disappeared without replying. But when you are launching something, you do not want the politeness trap. That was actually one of the best pieces of feedback I received.

What she was really saying was that she did not believe a single word on the landing page. In other words, the landing page needed a lot of work.

Then I reached out to several more people and asked them to review the landing page. Most of them said similar things. So I kept revamping it again and again until reaching the point where, at least for now, I think it is decent. (Let me know if you feel something is off.)

Another example was when someone asked me, “What is the difference between your product and using ChatGPT directly?”

To be honest, that was one of the hardest questions I had ever been asked.

If it were me six months ago, I probably would have responded defensively or simply said, “Yeah, there is no difference. Using ChatGPT directly is totally fine.”

But when you become less defensive, things become more interesting.

Yes, the question made me uncomfortable while sitting in front of my laptop. I paused, thought carefully for a while, and eventually answered in a way that at least satisfied myself.

This was my answer:

“When you start building a website, you rarely write everything line by line from scratch. Instead, you choose a framework to accelerate development. I applied the same thinking to this product. Human thoughts drift very easily. You might eventually arrive at similar conclusions using ChatGPT alone, but it often takes longer and lacks structure. I want to make that thinking process more opinionated, constrained, and systematic.”

Besides curiosity and being less defensive, the final trait I think matters is patience.

The German physiologist and physicist Hermann Helmholtz once said that the creative process itself is oscillatory. There are five stages of creativity which are now widely recognized: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

It starts with a signal, an interesting thing that captures your attention. Then you begin collecting evidence, immersing yourself deeply in research and saturation. After that comes incubation. You pause, walk around, think quietly, or simply let the idea mature on its own. Eventually clarity starts surfacing from the initially vague thinking. Then comes verification again.

The creative work is not linear.

The other day, someone in a private channel asked anyone felt their Substack growth had recently slowed down.

Personally speaking, growth has never felt linear to me. Some weeks I do not even gain a single subscriber. Other weeks I suddenly gain dozens.

So what do I do when growth feels slow? Honestly, I do almost nothing.

I read high-quality articles to make myself feel intellectually fulfilled and emotionally grounded. I restack good writing. I share what I read, what I felt, and what I learned. That is it. Nothing extra.

Many people online say similar things. Have you noticed that sometimes when you post fewer notes, you actually grow more? I have experienced something similar too.

Creative writing is oscillatory. Building products is oscillatory. Growth itself is oscillatory. Even growing on social media is not actually that complicated. But it is never linear.

Try to become a trampoline. Stay curious about other people’s ideas. Stay non-defensive about your own ideas. Be patient with yourself.

You, your product, and your ideas will all be bounced around here and there. But a trampoline does not break under pressure. It absorbs, adapts, and sends energy back upward.

Keep bouncing. Keep learning.

Over time, people naturally begin to remember you.

---

I’ve been building IdeaGrit for the last few weeks. It’s a tool for pressure-testing startup ideas. Help you find the right hard thing to commit to.

I just shipped a new feature called pre-mortem. It shows six real similar products and how they failed.

Sign up and you’ll be automatically upgraded to Pro with 1 free credit. You’ll get a report, an actionable roadmap, and a pre-mortem with six real failed products based on the same idea.

Use code FRIEND2026 at checkout for 50% off — launch pricing until June.

If you found this helpful, I’d really appreciate an upvote.

---