I stopped showing up to show up better

Hey there, my friend!

I owe you an explanation.

Five months. No emails. No explanation. Just silence, sitting there, while your inbox filled up with everyone else’s words.

Most people would pretend it didn’t happen. Ease back in. “Hope you’ve been well!”

I’m not going to do that.

I disappeared. I know. Here’s why.

I was building something. Not another newsletter but an actual system. The kind I kept telling you about: the framework, the prompts, the 30-day structure, all of it. Six weeks in I realized I couldn’t do both well. The system was half-finished. The emails were getting thinner. And I kept saying “I’ll catch up next week.”

So I stopped. Full attention went to the system.

I kept thinking about what it actually means to show up for people.

I’ve been writing for years. Sometimes twice a week. Treating consistency like a muscle you have to exercise or lose. And some weeks I had something real. And some weeks I was sending because Thursday came and the calendar said so.

You could tell those ones. I could too.

Five months away gave me distance I haven’t had in years. I started reading my own work the way you’d read it instead of the way I write it. And I noticed what I’d started doing: the formulas, the patterns, the techniques that made anything sound polished without having to say much.

That’s useful. But somewhere in there it started to feel mechanical. And if it felt mechanical to me writing it, it probably felt mechanical to you reading it.

I don’t want to write emails that sound good anymore. I want to write ones that shift how you think about something. Even if that means fewer of them.

Here’s what I kept coming back to.

The people who actually change their careers and their lives tend to make one or two contrarian moves. Working less while everyone else grinds harder. Shipping less while the algorithm demands more volume. I spent five months building instead of performing consistency. That was the thing I kept coming back to.

The newsletter is coming back. But it’s going to be different.

Less frequent. More intentional. The emails I send are going to be the ones I couldn’t not write.

I also built something around the career questions I’ve been sitting with. I’ll tell you exactly what it is next time.

For now: I’m back, I have something for you, and it’s more real than anything I had five months ago.

Talk soon,

Stephan

P.S. What would you build if you gave yourself five months instead of five years? Hit reply. I read every one.