Parenting is the best part of my life. What I have re-learned from it is that real joy is in the small moments. The first time she said “mama” was a spectacular moment, but it is in delighting in her coy smile as I change her diaper that I find beauty. You have to love the process of your labor, not the outcome of it. That has been true in making this newsletter company happen too.

Unfortunately, when I founded The Leverage six months ago though, I ignored this lesson. The launch was momentous. We added over 30,000 subscribers, and there was lots of public praise on social media. My vision for a new type of tech publication—one that was beautiful, rigorous, and written by a practitioner rather than yet another journalist—resonated with lots of people. By being ferociously independent, I could avoid some of the advertiser or audience capture that bothered me about existing options.

You’ll note that these are some lofty ideals. The practical reality of these fancy words is me typing, pantsless and over-caffeinated, in the corner of my bedroom for six hours a day. While I believe in the mission of The Leverage , so much so that I have staked my financial future on doing so, I ignored the lessons that fatherhood was teaching me.

If you spend as much time in spreadsheets and code as I do, it is tempting to think of the world as a simple, deterministic relationship. If you simply do input X, you’ll get output Y. So I did all the right things. I tweeted! I published articles that clearly solved problems for readers. Eventually, though, that simply didn’t work.

July and August were where this truth became most obvious. Revenue growth completely flattened for the newsletter despite me doing all of the X inputs you are “supposed” to do.

What I was forced to learn was that all truly great things in life are grown, not processesized into existence. Companies are not sterile laboratories of capitalist science. They are a teeming masses of humanity all striving to make something happen. When you are trying to bring something new in the world, following “best practices” is a trap not just for the company but for your soul.

12 Months a Father, 6 Months a Founder