32. How to find your people: Part 4. Slow growth is real growth

In this final episode of our series on finding your people, we explore why slow growth is the only real growth — and why the obsession with speed is actually working against your long-term success.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• Why the Charlie Munger/Warren Buffett investment philosophy applies directly to online business growth
• The hidden costs of chasing shortcuts — and how they actually train your brain to think in ways that lose money
• Four business fundamentals that predict long-term success better than follower counts or viral posts ever could
• The difference between being patient vs. passive

In a world where everyone else is burning out chasing the latest growth shortcut, find out why patience might be your best friend in business. 

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Business Fundamentals Assessment Worksheet

Instead of asking "Is this working?" based on follower counts or viral posts, assess your actual business fundamentals — the underlying factors that predict long-term success.

1. Do you actually enjoy the work itself?

Reflection questions:

• Do I find satisfaction in the process of sharing my ideas and connecting with people?
• Am I showing up because I want to, or just because I think I have to?
• Does my current approach align with my values and authenticity?
• What aspects of my work energize me vs. drain me?

To do: Identify one change you could make to enjoy your work more.

2. Are you getting better at your craft?

The craft of your actual work:

• Am I more skilled at delivering my product/service than I was 6 months ago?
• What specific improvements can I point to?

The craft of marketing and selling:

• Am I getting more comfortable sharing more of myself (not just polished work)?
• Am I finding it easier to focus on genuinely helping rather than performing value?
• Am I better at understanding what people actually need help with?
• Am I learning to be more creative with marketing (vs. cold strategy)?
• Am I finding it easier to have real conversations (vs. broadcasting)?

To do: List 3 specific ways you've improved in the last 6 months:

3. Are you actually building relationships?

Remember: Growth starts with people closest to you. Don't dismiss connections from friends, family, or colleagues as "not real."

• Are people responding to your work (even if slowly)?
• Are your ideas traveling (people mentioning/sharing them)?
• Have you had genuine conversations this week?
• Are you helping people without attachment to outcomes?

 To do: List 5 real connections/responses from the past month (no matter how small).

4. Are you actually showing up consistently?

Are you doing the work or just stressing about the work? Track time spent this week on actually creating and sharing something that matters to you, having real conversations with human beings, helping someone solve a problem vs. stressing, analyzing, researching, overthinking.

What foundation are you building that you can't see yet?

Transcript

Hey everyone. You are listening to Liberatory Business. I'm Simone Seol, your host. Thank you so much for listening, and this is part four of the series on how to find your people. Now I originally envisioned this as a three-part series, but characteristically, I realized while recording part three that actually there has to be a really important fourth part to this conversation that I couldn't possibly leave out.

So here it is, part four—it's gotta be part of this. This is about daring to grow slower, letting it take time. Slow growth is the only real growth. And I really wanna shout this message from the mountaintops in a world where everyone is obsessed with speed. I felt like especially this message could not be skipped because what I'm about to talk about today grounds everything else that we've talked about, and it's gonna inspire you to move at a pace that's gonna actually allow you to implement everything we've talked about in a way that's gonna stick.

So over the past three episodes, we've talked about sharing more of yourself and focusing on genuinely helping people rather than performing help, and treating marketing as an art form. Because here's what I know: Inevitably, after sharing these ideas, I know I'm gonna get asked, "Okay, Simone, it all sounds great, but how long until this actually works? How long until I start to see results?" And I get it. Even though the principles make sense, you wanna know when you're gonna see your numbers go up, when people are gonna start paying attention. Totally normal.

And here's what I want you to know: even though the question itself is understandable, it's also the wrong question, and it's been planted in all of our brains by a culture that profits enormously—to be honest—from our impatience. But real growth, the kind that actually sustains you and your community, does not happen on a timeline that you can predict or control. And it certainly does not happen on a timeline that you can speed up on demand. It's not something that most people want to hear, but it is a message that people end up thanking me for once they've been burnt out on chasing quick wins and actually start building something that they can support sustainably, which supports them back sustainably.

So let's talk about this. The other day I was randomly looking at something on Instagram, randomly led to this book called The Tao of Charlie Munger, and I happened to find it in my library and it's actually quite a good book. I am really enjoying it. And if you don't know who Charlie Munger is, he's basically Warren Buffett's BFF, or used to be Warren Buffett's right-hand man for decades. And I'm sure you know who Warren Buffett is, right? He's like the most legendary investor in all of history. Charlie Munger passed away a couple years ago, and he, alongside Buffett, the two of them were legendary investors and they together built Berkshire Hathaway, this trillion-dollar company. When Munger died, he was worth about 2.7 billion. So he's not some random dude—he's someone who actually figured out how to build massive wealth, and the vast majority of it purely through long-term investments in companies, which is really extraordinary.

I'm reading this book and I come across this quote about investing, and it just hit me that this idea really applies to online business as well. Here's a quote from The Tao of Charlie Munger: "Trying to get rich fast is dangerous because we have to gamble on the short-term price direction of some stock or other asset. There are a huge number of people trying to do the same thing, many of whom are much better informed than we are. The short-term price direction of any security or derivative contract is subject to all kinds of wild price swings due to events that have nothing to do with the actual long-term value of the underlying business or asset."

Now, there's a lot of big finance words in there that I don't necessarily understand, but you basically get the idea, right? So I'm sitting there thinking, okay, this is exactly what's happening in so much of the online business world. So much of what Charlie Munger learned about building wealth through investing applies directly to building an audience online, growing a business online.

So let's step back and think about what made Charlie Munger different from a lot of other investors. And I think this is actually quite famous, quite well known if you have any interest in investing. I know that I'm not the most educated about this, but I feel like I know some basics. So a lot of you might know a lot more than me about this. Some of you might be like, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

But basically what made both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett super famous and what made them different is exactly the same thing that made them ridiculously successful—like legendary level successful—which is that most investors in the world are obsessed with short-term returns. They're trying to figure out where this stock's gonna be in six months, and they're chasing whatever hot tip they just heard. They're trying to figure out whatever the trend is and jump on those trends. It's all about the quick wins.

Whereas Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were playing the opposite game. They're looking at whether a company would still be making money and growing in 10 years. While everybody's looking at a timeframe of like a few months, they were looking at 10 years, 20 years sort of timeframe. They cared about the fundamentals. When they were looking at investing in a business, they're like, "Okay, what's the underlying structure, the health of a business? Who's managing the company?" They weren't looking at the ups and downs on a day-to-day basis that everyone else is freaking out about. They tuned out so much of what the world was paying attention to.

And where it gets interesting for us is that this exact same approach—this long-term, fundamentals-focused thinking—applies exactly to generating meaningful, sustainable, and lasting and big online business growth, I think. And I feel good about myself because this is what I've always believed and this is what I practice. And now I have the backing of the biggest investors that ever lived, right?

Because like I said, so many people are obsessed with fast growth, and so many people are trying to sell you solutions for fast growth. But here's the thing: I think most people who are trying to sell you fast growth solutions are basically—it's like the same thing as trying to sell you an overpriced stock that's right at its peak.

When somebody's talking about some new growth hack—I don't know, whatever the latest TikTok, Instagram reels ad strategy is—that is when it's the most expensive to buy into. And also it's exactly when it's about to stop working, 'cause now everybody knows about it and everyone is doing it. And that's exactly when the platforms are about to change their algorithm to shut it down. Because the whole point of an algorithm is that they have to keep changing what's working so that people can't game it.

So it's like trying to jump on whatever the hottest new trend is—it's like buying the Tesla stock when it's a thousand dollars because you heard your neighbor made money on Tesla stock. You're paying the highest price possible because, oh, it's a hot stock, but it already had its moment.

Meanwhile, the Charlie Munger-Warren Buffett approach, which is doing the slow, patient work that is long-term focused and fundamentals focused—building genuine relationships and creating actually valuable solutions—looks boring. It looks like it's not yielding hot returns in the short term, but it has way better long-term economics.

Let me tell you something about proven strategies for growth, okay? 'Cause you get sold a hundred of them every single day. They don't exist. At least not in the way that they're being sold to you. Whether it's viral hooks or engagement strategies or whatever the algorithm hack of the month is, these tactics might give you a temporary spike, but they do not create lasting growth.

Every person who has built substantial lasting growth will tell you the same thing if you ask them and they're answering totally honestly: their growth happened through totally unique and unpredictable and unforeseeable circumstances. A random connection leading to an unexpected opportunity. Someone shared their work in a context that they could have never predicted, totally randomly. They got featured somewhere that they never even thought to pitch. They were at the right place at the right moment, and they happened to say the right thing when someone just walked in the door.

There's no way to systemize that kind of serendipity. You can't optimize your way into being at the right place at the right time. But there is a whole industry—very lucrative industry—convincing you otherwise. You're constantly being sold the idea that you're behind, that you're missing something that other people have figured out, some secret that you haven't.

And our brains are all wired to want immediate gratification. So these promises feel so irresistible. And of course social media shows you everybody else's most curated moments, and it makes all of our normal, slow, healthy rates of progress feel inadequate, like we're doing something wrong.

But what if you are not? What if you're not behind? What if you are doing everything right? What if you're exactly where you should be?

Because let me tell you something. Because of the nature of my job, I have seen all of the things. I have seen the behind the scenes of every single business at every single level of growth—at least online business—because I myself have run a business that has made five figures a year, six figures a year, multiple seven figures a year, and I have clients and colleagues at every level. I have seen it all, including what many people consider overnight success stories. I myself am—a lot of people, for some reason, think that I'm an overnight success story, which ha ha ha ha. I'm about to tell you how not.

Wherever you think there's quick growth, wherever you think there's an overnight success story, I promise you, you are not seeing the years of work they did before anyone was paying attention. What it looks to you like quick growth is never a story of someone who got rich quick. It's more like—think about it like this: when a company suddenly becomes a household name or a company suddenly gets sold for tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, and everybody thinks, "Oh my God, where did this company come from? They came out of nowhere!"—but they didn't come out of nowhere. That company was being built. The founders were working behind the scenes for years before anybody's ever heard of them. They didn't just emerge out of thin air.

What you're not seeing is the connections that had been built for years, the skills that had been developed, the investment that went into all that, the audience that they've been building. You're not seeing all the failures, the pivots, the years of work that went nowhere. You're not seeing the team that has been supporting them, the financial resources they started with, the industry relationships.

And the thing is that I think for the most part, people aren't even necessarily hiding these and lying about them most of the time. I think the nature of publicity and the nature of fame is such that naturally we don't know about things before they become well known. We don't know about success stories before they become what people consider success stories. So even if people aren't lying or omitting on purpose, a large part of the real story of how someone comes to their success stays obscured.

Now, are there exceptions to the rule of "real sustainable success always takes time"? I wanna say...it seems like yes, sometimes. Let me explain. In a very small percentage of cases, people actually do grow quickly from seemingly nothing, and it is a statistical anomaly—very small percentage of cases. And let me break down this statistically small percentage into two subgroups, because once people grow very quickly from nothing, they end up splitting into two groups, given enough time.

So in the majority of cases when the quick rise to success and fame was not built on substance and quality and a strong foundation, and it was pure luck, given enough time, they 100% burn out and flame out. It's like they erected a castle on a foundation of quicksand and it's bound to come crumbling down because the foundation cannot bear the weight of all of that success. And it usually comes at a pretty significant psychological cost to the person that the success happened to. So much so that I worry when I see quote-unquote lucky success happen to someone when they're not prepared for it. It's like, "Oh shit. I hope that person is okay." I worry about them.

Now, there are people who get a lucky break and then they don't flame out. They don't crash. They sustain their success. They sustain their luck. That's the other subgroup. So what's up with those people? Well, what's up with those people is that, yeah, they might have gotten lucky in the first place, but before they did, they had initially done invisible work for a long time before to create the foundation that can sustain that success. This is never not true, in my opinion.

So can luck be a factor? A hundred percent. Is luck the only factor? Never. Is luck enough? Absolutely not.

And let me talk about my example. I built the foundation of my business for over 10 years. I keep saying 10 years 'cause in my mind, I'm still like 31. I'm gonna be 40 next year. So it's actually more like 20 years. It's so crazy. I keep saying 10 years, but it's actually—that timeframe is outdated by about 10 years.

And if you could see my actual journey mapped out over time, it would look nothing like the smooth upward curve that you might imagine. It would look like a series of plateaus punctuated by random jumps that seem to come out of nowhere. 'Cause growth is not linear for anybody—not for me, not for anyone I know. And I know a lot of people. Never has been, never will be for anyone.

You'll go for months, years feeling like nothing is happening and suddenly something shifts and you have more opportunities that seem like they came out of fucking nowhere. Then it goes quiet again, and then something else unexpected happens. And it's always like these long periods of sideways movement punctuated by sudden jumps. But those jumps only happened because of the foundation that you built during the boring, uneventful periods.

One client of mine went two years feeling like she was just yelling into the void and then got featured in a major publication because somebody's assistant happened to be subscribed to her newsletter. Someone else I know was building very slowly and steadily for three years—didn't look like anything dramatic was happening—before she just randomly started talking to somebody at a coffee shop. That led to a partnership that totally transformed their business overnight.

Literally, I guarantee you, if you ask a hundred people who have the kind of visibility and impact that you are dreaming about how they got to where they are, I promise you every single one of them will tell you that the path, they couldn't have predicted in advance. But here's what they do have in common, which you can learn from in order to create conditions for yourself to create that kind of visibility and impact: every single one of these people found a way to be genuinely motivated by the work itself, not just the outcomes.

They had an internal reward system that sustained them through the long periods where it seemed like nothing was happening. They were genuinely passionate about their craft. They were fascinated by the problems they were solving, and they were energized by the process of getting better at what they did. And of course, they might care about external validation, but it was secondary to the internal satisfaction of doing the work and doing it well.

These are always the common factors of the people who do their work long enough to get through the boring periods where it looks like nothing is happening. Those periods lay the psychological foundation, or they persist long enough for the breakthrough moments to arrive.

So having said all that, I know that even knowing this intellectually doesn't make the emotional pressure go away. I know that. And that's real. When you're watching your bank account, when you see other people seemingly get to where you wanna go faster with less effort, you're questioning whether any of what you're doing is working at all. It's really understandable to be like, "But there's gotta be a shortcut. There's gotta be something I can do to speed things up." I get it. And I'm not gonna tell you here to just ignore that pressure or to pretend that it doesn't matter because it does matter. And dismissing that is not helpful at all.

But here's what I do wanna address, because I think what I'm about to say next is very, almost never mentioned anywhere, and I think at great cost to people: when we are in that anxious state of seeking shortcuts, feeling like we're behind, like "I need something to work," when we are making those decisions, I need you to observe what happens. 'Cause we end up making decisions that work against us. We make decisions that actually set us back further because every hour that you spend trying to game the system is every hour that you're not spending working on something that matters.

Let me explain. For example, every hour that you're trying to work on a shortcut, what you're not doing is you're not developing your expertise—actually getting better at whatever it is that you do, or learning how to explain your ideas more clearly. You're not building real relationships—having actual conversations with people, understanding what they're struggling with, and being genuinely helpful, leaving people in a better place than you found them, getting better at that. You are not creating things that are still gonna be valuable five, 10 years from now.

And I keep making these parallels to investing, and that parallel to investing shows us—this isn't just about wasting your time, it's about actively, like I said, working against your own interest. Because when you're chasing shortcuts and audience growth, you are like a day trader who's so busy refreshing their portfolio every five minutes and chasing the hot stock of the day that they never actually build a real portfolio. They're not researching which companies are solid. They're not learning about different industries. They're not developing the patience and the knowledge that actually creates wealth over time.

And if you are doing the equivalent, you're not just missing out on steady growth, you're training your brain to think in the wrong timeframe. Every hour you spend optimizing for this week's algorithm change is an hour you're not developing the skills and the relationships that's gonna matter next year, in three years, in five years. You are training your brain to think in a way that loses money. And I need this to sink in with you because not enough people talk about this.

Now I know some of you might be thinking at this point, "Okay, Simone, I get it. Slow and steady wins the race. Fundamentals, long view wins the race. I get it. But how do I know if I'm being patient and strategic versus if what I'm doing is actually not working and I'm just making excuses and being complacent?" And that is a really, really good question that deserves a really good answer. Because I agree there is a big difference between being patient and being passive. I want you to be patient. I don't want you to be passive. Building something real and sustainable is not the same thing as just waiting around, hoping something's gonna happen. Totally different.

And the way to tell the difference, once again, comes back to our investment analogy. So let's think about these anxious day traders versus the Charlie Mungers and the Warren Buffetts of the world. Day traders are constantly checking their phones. "How much money did I make today? Did this stock go up? Did that stock go down? Should I buy this one now? What are other people saying?" They're obsessed with what happened in the last few hours and what's gonna happen this week, next month.

Long-term investors—the Mungers and Buffetts of the world—are asking totally different questions. They're not just sitting around doing nothing. They're not passive. They're still very engaged. They're very active. They're just asking a different quality, different level of questions. They're asking, "Hmm, will people need what this company provides in 20 years? Does this company have something that its competitors can't easily copy? Is the management team healthy?" They're looking at the fundamentals of a company that create lasting value. They're not looking at daily price movements.

So let's translate this to online business. Your equivalent metrics aren't follower counts or whether your posts are getting viral, or how many people are commenting, or how many people are buying. They're what we could call our business fundamentals—the underlying factors that determine long-term success. Instead of wondering "Is this working?" you can ask more substantive questions like, "Are my business fundamentals getting stronger?" And these aren't just nice-to-haves, they're actual metrics that predict long-term success. And I'm going to tell you what they are. And I am also going to turn these into, like I did a few episodes ago, a worksheet that you can use in your business. So I'm gonna put that in the show notes, so please make use of it and I hope you find it useful.

Okay, so here are the metrics of business fundamentals that you should be proactively working on as opposed to just waiting and being patient and being passive:

First, do you actually enjoy the work itself, the work of your business, whatever it is? Or are you just grinding through it? If you're only showing up because you think you have to, or if you're not finding any satisfaction in the process of sharing your ideas, connecting with people, that's a problem. 'Cause sustainable growth comes from work that you can actually sustain. And if you hate the process, if you find it boring or annoying, or if you feel like it goes against your values or the way you do things, your authenticity, you're not gonna be able to stick with it long enough for it to work. So figuring out a way to do the work that you can enjoy, that's a really important part of the work.

Second, are you getting better at your craft? And by craft I mean both the craft of what you do—the product or services that you have on sale—and also the craft of marketing and selling. Think about all the ideas that I've shared with you in this series. Are you getting increasingly more comfortable and skillful with them? Are you getting better at sharing more of yourself instead of just your polished work, hiding behind professionalism? Are you finding it easier to focus on genuinely helping people rather than just performing value? Are you finding it easier to understand what it means to help people, what people need help with? Because that's a skill too. That's something that you need to study. That's something that you need to invest your time and energy and brain into.

Are you learning how to be more creative with your marketing as opposed to just looking at it as cold strategy? Are you finding it easier to share what actually matters to you? Are you finding it easier to be more authentic? Are you finding it easier to have real conversations with people as opposed to just broadcasting at them?

And if you've been doing this work for months or years but you don't feel any more skillful or any more comfortable, then that's a sign that something might need to shift. But if you feel yourself getting better at the actual craft of authentic communication and genuine relationships and the craft of what it is that you actually do, even if external results aren't dramatic yet, you are on the right track. And the skill development is often invisible to everybody else, but it's one of the most reliable indicators that you're building something real.

And speaking of relationships, are you actually building relationships? Even small ones, even subtle ones. Are people responding to your work? Even if it's slow, even if your brain tells you that it's insignificant because it's just a friend who already knows you. And by the way, this is what people get wrong all the time. They think, "Oh, it doesn't count because it's my best friend. It doesn't count because it was a random stranger. It doesn't count because it's my colleague. It doesn't count because it's my cousin." It counts! They're waiting for some magical moment when "real people," whatever that means, start paying attention. That's not how influence works.

Growth almost always starts with the people closest to you. Seth Godin said this. Not just me. And if you have been living under a rock and don't know who Seth Godin is, he's the biggest marketing expert in the universe and the only marketing expert in the conventional world that I respect.

Your friends always are your first customers, and this is true for everyone. It's true for me as well. Your colleagues become your first referrals. People who already know you and trust you become the foundation that everything else builds on. So if you're dismissing those first connections from your existing web of connections as not real, then you're missing the most important signals that your work is resonating.

The myth of a stranger who finds you through a search and then immediately buys from you—that almost never happens until much, much later in the process. Whereas a friend who happens to mention your work to someone who mentions this to somebody else, who eventually becomes a client—that's how it actually works. So stop waiting for validation from strangers and start paying attention to people who are actually around you, who actually already know you and like you, and are responding to your work. That's where real growth begins.

And finally, are you actually showing up consistently or just telling yourself you are? Are you actually doing the work in a committed way? When I say doing the work, I mean all of what I just said. Are you doing it in a committed way or are you spending more time being stressed out about doing the work than actually doing it?

Because here's what I see all the time. People think, "Oh, I'm working on my business, I'm working on my marketing." But what they're actually doing is spending time stressing out about marketing. They're looking up strategies and analyzing this and that, refreshing their analytics and having anxiety spirals about why their latest post didn't perform well. That's not doing the work, that's avoiding the work.

Actually doing the work means sitting your ass down and writing something that matters to you and sharing it, even though it feels scary and vulnerable. It means having an actual conversation with another human being. It means showing up to share something that you created, even if you don't feel like it. It means showing up to help someone to have a slightly better day than before they saw your post. It means showing up to help someone solve a problem without being attached to whether it's gonna lead to anything.

And if you're spending more mental energy being anxious about your results than you are actually creating and connecting, you're not actually showing up to your business. You're just performing the stress of entrepreneurship.

And also notice if your ideas travel. And I don't mean like something has to go viral. I've been in business, I've been showing up online for nearly two decades. And I can count on one hand the number of times my content went viral, and none of it even had to do with my business. So going viral, never necessary.

When I say "Are your ideas traveling?" I mean like somebody mentioning, "Oh, so-and-so shared this idea and it was really interesting" in their own conversation. Somebody referring a friend to something you wrote, even if it's just one person telling one friend about something that you said—that's influence happening in real time. That is the kind of idea travel that actually builds real businesses.

You know, I think one of the biggest brain lies that happen is this sentence: "Nothing's happening." "I've been doing this for months and nothing is happening. I've been doing this for years, and nothing is happening." And the first thing that I wanna ask if your brain tries to tell you this is: what does it mean for you when your brain says nothing is happening? What's nothing?

Because most likely what's happening is that you're essentially looking at your business like a day trader, checking stock prices every hour. "Why didn't my follower count go up from last week? Why didn't that post get more engagement?" But if you own shares in a solid company, you wouldn't panic because the stock didn't go up this week, this month—at least Warren Buffett wouldn't. Charlie Munger wouldn't. You'd look at whether a company is still making good products, still has customers that love what they do and still has smart, ethical people running the company. That stuff is what matters long term.

When your brain says nothing is happening, what you might actually mean is, "I can't see something dramatic that's happening yet." Because all the patient work—the post that only got a couple likes, the conversations that felt too insignificant, the slow, non-linear, messy process of getting better at your craft (and by the way, it's always messy and non-linear)—that's what's actually building something real underneath the surface. And you just can't see the foundation while you're building it.

For years and years, for me, it felt like nothing was happening, but slowly but surely, I was getting better at what I did. The problem is that you can't see the foundation while you're building it. You only see it in retrospect. So when you say nothing is happening, what you might actually mean is, "I can't see what's happening yet." If you've been truly doing the work—not just thinking about it, not just stressing about it, but actually doing it consistently—trust that it's working even when you can't see how yet.

So my advice for everyone is the same. Do the real work of helping people. Show up consistently. Share what you're learning. Have genuine conversations. Get better at your craft. This entire series has been about the same thing, really—doing the fundamentals that actually build something lasting.

And just remember that the best investors don't try to time the market. They don't try to manipulate the factors. They build portfolios that are based on something real that are gonna compound over decades. Because your patience isn't just a strategy. It gets to be your competitive advantage. In a world where everyone's burning out, chasing the latest hack, you have the opportunity to build something that's gonna outlast all of them.

So trust the process. Every genuine conversation, every piece of content that truly leaves someone in a better place than you found them, every moment you choose authenticity—it all adds up to something way bigger than you could possibly predict or see right now.

So thank you so much for listening to this entire series. Just another reminder that you can find the worksheet version of this episode in the show notes, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.