Last week I spent about $160 advertising a first-time homebuyer webinar. I promoted it for seven days. One person showed up.

There are few numbers more capable of making $160 feel like a lot of money than the number one.

And I felt it. That little drop in your stomach when something you made goes out into the world and the world responds with…mostly other plans.

This is one of the stranger parts of trying something new. You can have weeks of perfectly respectable progress — learning, practicing, getting a little better — and barely notice any of it.

Then you stumble.

Oh, you notice that.

And for some reason, while thinking about my spectacularly intimate webinar, I started thinking about the stock market.

The Stumble Is Spectacular

Pull up a chart of the stock market over the last hundred years and, from a distance, the story is pretty obvious.

Up and to the right.

Not smoothly. There are some horrifying detours in there. But the overwhelming shape is a long climb made up of thousands of mostly unremarkable days.

And yet those aren't the days we remember.

We remember 1929. We remember 2008. We remember COVID. Nobody remembers that one Tuesday when the market gained 0.4%.

There was no breaking news. No special report. No panel of seven people yelling at each other about WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR FAMILY.

Because slow progress has terrible production value.

A crash is remarkable in the most literal sense. People remark on it.

And I think we do the same thing to ourselves.

I've been putting myself out there more lately. New career. New business. More videos. More writing. More opportunities to discover that perhaps I am not yet the Michael Jordan of Facebook advertising.

Some things have worked. Some haven't. Guess which ones my brain keeps excellent records of.

The stumbles.

There's a comforting version of this that says you shouldn't worry about failing publicly, because nobody's really watching. I've heard it about social media specifically: the bad videos don't get distributed, the algorithm buries them, and eventually people only see your good stuff.

There's something reassuring about that. There's also something conveniently incomplete about it.

Because somebody saw it. And sometimes that somebody leaves a comment, just to make sure you know they saw it too.

People have been generous enough lately to give me several opportunities for personal growth.

It stings. And I don't want to sanitize that, because I think the sanitized version ruins the whole point. Failure doesn't feel like “feedback” when it's happening. It feels like failure.

Embarrassment is immediate. Progress is cumulative.

The stumble is today. The climb is the chart.

And I'm trying to get better at remembering which one I'm looking at.

Back to My Party of One

So there I was with my one-person webinar. If I stop the analysis at attendance, the experiment failed.

$160. Seven days. One person.

Except then I actually gave the webinar. And the person who attended loved it. We had a great conversation. They found the information useful. At the end, they told me they'd recommend that friends and family talk to me before buying a house.

Which created a problem with my failure. It wasn't failing correctly.

Maybe I don't have a webinar problem. Maybe I have a getting-people-to-the-webinar problem. And that problem has dials.

Was the message wrong? Wrong audience? Bad ad? Weak offer? Wrong channel?

I don't know yet. That's the point.

“I failed” doesn't give me much to work with. “One person came, and that person loved it” does.

Same stumble. Completely different information.

The Long-Term Chart

Maybe staying in the market isn't about pretending the drops aren't real. It's refusing to confuse the latest data point with the entire chart.

Look at the stumble. Figure out what it can teach you. Turn a dial. Make attempt number eight.

Then zoom out.

And since we're talking about doing uncomfortable things, I'm going to do one right now.

Please Share This Newsletter

I've historically been much more comfortable making something useful and hoping people tell other people about it than actually asking them to.

That's becoming a problem.

I'm building a business that depends on relationships, introductions, referrals, and people being willing to say, “You should talk to Ricky.” So I need to practice asking.

If you enjoy these newsletters, please send this one to someone you think would enjoy it too. It helps me meet people I wouldn't otherwise meet and helps this little thing I'm building reach beyond the people who already know me.

Maybe nothing happens. Maybe one person reads it.

I'm learning not to underestimate one person.

— Ricky