Smarter Strategies for When You're Stuck
Plus the Stagnation-to-Growth Implementation System.
You’re stuck?
Good.
Not “good” as in, I’m trying to motivate you to keep going. Keep going is the last thing you should do.
“Good” as in, this is the moment when you can 10X growth — if you handle it well.
The solopreneurs who build seven-figure businesses don’t avoid stagnation.
They use it.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck spent three decades studying why some people thrive after setbacks while others collapse.
Her research revealed that high performers don’t experience fewer stagnant periods—they interpret them differently.
Stagnation isn’t the problem. Your response to it is.
Let me illustrate this with a story about Edison.
“They’ll never see a fire like this again.”
In 1914, Thomas Edison’s factory burned to the ground.
He was 67 years old. Decades of research—gone. $7 million in damage (over $200 million today). His son found him standing there, watching everything burn.
That’s when Edison said: “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.”
The next morning, he was rebuilding. Within three weeks, he was back to inventing. He later said, “When all your machinery is destroyed, you’re forced to go ahead and do what you should have done in the first place.”
This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s a fundamental mindset shift.
Most entrepreneurs in Edison’s position would have seen total stagnation—maybe even retirement. They would have asked: “How do I recover what I lost?”
Edison asked: “What was I holding onto that was actually holding me back?”
That fire didn’t just destroy his factory. It destroyed his attachment to doing things the old way. The forced stagnation created space for reinvention.
Here’s the pattern nobody talks about.
Every major breakthrough in business history was preceded by a period that looked like total stagnation.
YouTube started as a failed video dating site
Twitter emerged from a dying podcasting platform called Odeo
Instagram began as a cluttered app called Burbn that nobody used
Slack was built from the wreckage of a failed gaming company
They weren’t pivoting from success to more success. They were transmuting stagnation into something entirely new.
Who will scale and who will quit?
Right now, you’re asking the wrong question about your stagnant period.
You’re asking: “How do I get unstuck and return to growth?”
You should be asking: “What is this stagnation trying to teach me that my momentum was hiding?”
This isn’t semantic wordplay. It’s a crucial difference in how your brain processes the experience.
When you ask “how do I get unstuck,” you’re operating from a fixed mindset. You see stagnation as a problem to solve.
When you ask “what is this teaching me,” you’re operating from a growth mindset. You see stagnation as data, as a necessary phase that’s revealing something you couldn’t see while you were moving fast.
The paradigm shift from treating stagnation as an emergency to treating it as intelligence is already separating the solopreneurs who will scale from those who will quit.
Breakthrough growth happens after stagnation.
James Clear (author of Atomic Habits, 15+ million copies sold) spent two years writing a blog that few people read. Complete stagnation. Zero growth. He could have quit. Instead, he used that period to refine his thinking, test different frameworks, and develop the concepts that would later become one of the best-selling books of the decade.
He later said: “That period of invisibility was essential. I wasn’t ready for an audience yet. The stagnation forced me to get better before I got bigger.”
Ali Abdaal plateaued at 10K YouTube subscribers for 18 months. He tried everything to break through—different formats, topics, posting schedules. Nothing worked. Then he stopped trying to grow and started studying why his best videos worked. He reverse-engineered his own success during that stagnant period. When he applied those insights, he went from 10K to 1M subscribers in 12 months.
The point is that stagnation isn’t the obstacle. It’s the opportunity.
From stuck to 10x: the framework.
If being stuck can be so great, you’re probably wondering HOW can you make the best of it, too.
How can you use it to achieve the 10X growth you aim for?
There are 5 distinct mindset shifts that transform stagnation from death sentence into growth catalyst.
Here’s the complete navigation map:
The Recognition Shift helps you see invisible progress.
The Reframe Shift helps you reframe your emotions & thoughts around the stagnation.
The Experimentation Shift gives you permission to test bigger & bolder ideas.
The Integration Shift is where experiments turn into a system.
The Anticipation Shift is where you learn to use deliberate pauses to create disproportionate breakthroughs.
Below, I’m going to walk you through each stage.
By the end of this newsletter, you’ll know exactly where you are “stuck” and exactly where you need to go next.
Why this matters more than anything.
Before we dive into the five stages, I need you to understand why this matters more than many of the business skills or platform hacks you’re focused on right now.
Peter Drucker—the man who invented modern management theory—said something that most people gloss over:
“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.”
Think about what he’s saying. For the first time in human history, you don’t need permission to build a business. You don’t need capital, infrastructure, or institutional backing.
But here’s the paradox: With infinite choices comes infinite paralysis.
And that means the solopreneurs who thrive won’t be the ones with the best AI skills or the best product ideas. They’ll be the ones with the best psychological operating systems—the ones who know how to process stagnation, failure, and uncertainty without falling apart.
Carol Dweck’s research found that individuals with a growth mindset consistently outperformed those with a fixed mindset. Not because they were smarter or more talented, but because they extracted learning from every experience, including (especially) the ones that looked like failure.
We’re in the middle of the greatest wealth transfer in human history. AI is about to create individual billion-dollar companies. The creator economy is projected to be worth $500 billion by 2030.
But most solopreneurs won’t capture any of that opportunity.
Why? Because they’ll quit during their first major stagnant period. They’ll interpret it as a sign they’re not cut out for this. They’ll go back to the safety of a paycheck.
The ones who understand how to use stagnation will compound their learning while everyone else is giving up.
The 5 Mindset Shifts
The Recognition Shift
This is the foundational shift from “nothing is happening” to “something is happening—I just can’t see the growth potential yet.”
Most solopreneurs experience stagnation as a black box—they’re putting in effort but seeing no results, and they have no idea what’s actually happening inside their business or their own psychology.
The Recognition Shift is about developing the ability to see invisible progress.
There’s a concept in psychology called “lag time”—the delay between when you plant a seed and when you see a sprout.
Research from the Journal of Applied Psychology found that most skill development follows a “plateau then spike” pattern. You work for weeks or months with no visible improvement, then suddenly—breakthrough.
But here’s the critical insight: that plateau period isn’t stagnation. It’s consolidation. Your brain is rewiring neural pathways. Your subconscious is processing patterns. Your reputation is building invisibly.
So how do you see invisible progress? It’s about perception, not performance (not yet).
If you’re running a service solo business, the Recognition Shift feels like: You don’t chase reassurance after every client call because you trust your own expertise. You no longer take every rejection personally. You can distinguish between a busy week and a productive one. You feel less reactive when things go wrong because you can see patterns forming underneath the chaos.
If you’re running a product solo business, the Recognition Shift feels like: You’re no longer trying to add more features; you’re finally confident cutting what doesn’t matter. You start thinking about longevity instead of just launch-week success.
If you’re running a content solo business, the Recognition Shift feels like: You no longer post to get noticed; you post to express an idea clearly. You spend more time refining your thinking than refreshing your stats. You’re less afraid of repeating yourself because you understand that repetition builds identity.
This stage alone doesn’t create growth—it just prevents you from quitting prematurely. If you stay here, you’ll be the consistent one, but not the wildly successful one.
The Recognition Shift buys you time to get to the next stage. Which is…
The Reframe Shift
This is where you stop asking “what’s wrong with me?” and start asking “what is this situation trying to teach me?”
It’s the shift from victim (”this is happening TO me”) to scientist (”this is happening FOR me—what’s the experiment?”).
Stanford researcher Alia Crum proved something wild:
Female hotel housekeepers who were told their daily job covers the daily exercise doctors recommend started losing weight and improving health markers.
Same work. Different frame. They started thinking of themselves as “someone who works out daily and lives a healthy life”—and the results matched that thinking.
Your plateau isn’t about doing more. It’s about reframing what you’re already doing.
When you reframe a stagnant period from “I’m failing” to “I’m learning something essential that will make me unstoppable,” your brain shifts from threat response to opportunity response.
It starts to look for things to learn. For patterns you may have missed before.
Threat response shuts down creativity and problem-solving. Opportunity response activates them.
Here’s what I learned during my recent stagnant period on Substack:
People who care show they care with their money. It’s okay to prioritise monetisation and paid subscribers.
It’s more important to find the thing 3 people absolutely LOVE, share, like, comment on and forward to their friends—than the thing that will get read the most.
What can you learn from your stagnation?
Reframing is powerful, but it’s still reactive. You’re responding to stagnation after it happens. If you stay here, you’ll become the person who’s good at making lemonade from lemons—but you’re still waiting for life to hand you lemons.
The Experimentation Shift
This is where most successful solopreneurs live. It’s the shift from “trying to get back to what was working” to “using this stagnation as permission to test what I’ve been afraid to try.”
Stagnation removes the risk of experimentation. If nothing’s working anyway, you might as well try the weird idea.
Research published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal found that entrepreneurs who increased their rate of experimentation during stagnant periods were more likely to discover breakthrough innovations than those who kept executing the same strategy harder.
The mechanism is simple: Momentum creates path dependency. When something’s working, you don’t want to mess with it. But that same momentum prevents you from discovering what could work 10X better.
Stagnation breaks the path dependency. It creates space for intelligent experimentation.
Tim Ferriss faced rejection by 26 out of 27 publishers for The 4-Hour Workweek and was initially considered unlikely to be a mainstream success.
Instead of following traditional marketing, he focused on unconventional strategies, such as targeting niche audiences and using emerging media channels like podcasts to build interest.
The experiments paid off: The 4-Hour Workweek stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for years.
Here are a few questions that will put you in an experimenting mindset:
What’s one thing I’ve secretly wanted to try but keep telling myself “now’s not the right time”?
What feels uncomfortable because it’s wrong—and what feels uncomfortable because it’s new?
If I stopped trying to scale and focused only on learning this month, what would I try first?
What small, low-stakes test could give me clarity faster than another month of overthinking?
The problem with experimentation is that if you’re constantly testing new things without learning from the results and building systems around what works, you’ll become the solopreneur with 50 unfinished projects and no sustainable business model.
Stagnation is nature’s way of giving you permission to experiment. But what comes next?
The Integration Shift
This is where you move from reactive experimentation to proactive pattern recognition.
You’re not just trying random things and seeing what works—you’re deliberately building a system that extracts insights from both success AND stagnation.
It’s the shift from “let me try this new thing” to “let me build a process that tells me what to try next, based on what I’m learning.”
Research in organizational psychology shows that companies with structured reflection practices (regular retrospectives, post-mortems, systematic documentation) outperform those without them by 25-40% in innovation metrics.
The reason is that they’re not just experiencing things—they’re learning systematically. They’re turning experience into wisdom, then wisdom into repeatable processes.
When you reach the Integration Shift, stagnation becomes a triggering event for a proven process, not an emotional crisis.
Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, built his SaaS to $28M in annual recurring revenue while publicly sharing his journey. But here’s what most people miss: He didn’t just share wins. He systematically documented every period of stagnation, every failed experiment, every wrong turn.
He created what he called “MRR retrospectives”—monthly deep dives where he analyzed not just what happened, but why it happened and what it meant for the next month.
This integration process turned stagnation from crisis into curriculum. Every plateau taught him something that accelerated the next growth phase.
When you hit a stagnant period, instead of panicking, you run your integration protocol:
What are the three most likely causes of this stagnation?
Which of my core metrics are actually moving (even if the main one isn’t)?
What experiments did I run in the last 90 days, and what did I learn from each?
What capability am I being forced to develop right now?
Based on this analysis, what’s my hypothesis for the next 30 days?
This isn’t busywork. It’s the difference between learning from stagnation and just suffering through it.
The Anticipation Shift
This is the apex of stagnation mastery. It’s the shift from “responding well to stagnation” to “proactively creating strategic stagnation for exponential growth.”
Wait, creating stagnation?
Yes. You read this right.
At this stage, you understand that deliberate pauses create disproportionate breakthroughs. You’re not waiting for stagnation to happen, you’re scheduling it.
There’s a concept in athletic training called “strategic deload”—deliberately reducing training volume to allow for recovery and supercompensation. Athletes who incorporate deload weeks consistently outperform those who train at max intensity year-round.
The same principle applies to business. Researchers at Harvard Business School found that companies that instituted “strategic pause periods”—quarterly offsites where teams stopped execution and focused only on reflection—showed higher innovation rates than peers.
The mechanism: Constant execution creates tunnel vision. Strategic stagnation creates peripheral vision. You see opportunities you’d miss while sprinting.
Bill Gates famously took “Think Weeks” twice a year—seven days where he’d isolate himself in a cabin, read, and think deeply about Microsoft’s future.
Some of Microsoft’s most important strategic decisions came from those weeks—including the shift to embrace the internet in the mid-90s, which arguably saved the company.
Gates wasn’t waiting for stagnation to force reflection. He was proactively creating pauses because he understood their value.
At this stage, you build strategic stagnation into your calendar:
Monthly “stop weeks” where you don’t create content, just analyze what’s working.
Quarterly “sabbaticals” where you deliberately step away from execution to see the business from 30,000 feet.
Annual “reset periods” where you question everything about your business model, even if it’s working.
This sounds counterintuitive. If things are working, why stop?
Because the solopreneurs at this level understand: Today’s success creates tomorrow’s blindness. Strategic stagnation is how you avoid building a business that becomes your prison.
Unfortunately, most solopreneurs never get here because they’re too afraid to deliberately slow down when things are working.
Now you understand the five mindset shifts and why they matter, but…
Knowing the stages versus implementing them are two different things.
You can intellectually understand the Recognition Shift, but when you’re three months deep in stagnation with no revenue growth, your nervous system will still interpret it as failure. You’ll still feel the panic. You’ll still want to quit.
Intellectual knowledge doesn’t override emotional wiring. Implementation does.
What you need next:
The complete system for moving through all five stages systematically. The specific questions to ask yourself at each stage. The mental exercises that rewire your automatic responses to stagnation. The documented processes that turn these concepts into repeatable behaviors.
You need:
The Stagnation Diagnostic Assessment. Why aren’t you growing? Why aren’t they paying attention? Is this the right business model at all? This identifies exactly where you’re stuck and why.
The 90-Day Mindset Shift Protocol (step-by-step implementation for each stage)
The Integration Templates (my personal frameworks for extracting insights from stagnant periods)
The Strategic Pause Toolkit (how to build productive stagnation into your calendar)
Here’s what’s included when you upgrade to paid:
🔓 Complete Stagnation-to-Growth Implementation System
The 47-question diagnostic that identifies your exact blocking point
Stage-specific action templates for each of the five shifts
My personal “Integration Journal” format (how I document every stagnant period)
The Strategic Pause Calendar Template
If you’re not ready to go paid yet, no pressure. Keep reading the free newsletter. I’ll keep sharing frameworks and insights every week. But when you hit your next stagnant period—and you will—remember these five stages. And remember that there’s an implementation system waiting when you’re ready to actually apply them.
[Get the Complete Implementation System Here By Becoming a Paid Subscriber 👇]