May 10, 2026 May 10, 2026 2026-05-10

In August 2009 I published 100 ways to live a better life. It took me about 2 weeks to write. I’d written list posts before — 33 questions, 25 things, 77 reasons — and all of them did well. But this one was from a completely different league.

The Posts That Didn’t Go Viral

By 2009 I’d been writing lists for a while. They got traffic, they built links, and they brought in decent amounts of readers. That’s not nothing — that’s actually most of what blogging is. Slow accumulation plus useful content finding the people it’s useful for.

None of those earlier lists went viral. They did what good posts do and stopped there. I wasn’t aiming for viral, either. I was aiming for useful, and those are different targets.

This post was different, and I didn’t see it coming.

What Going Viral Actually Looks Like

The post hit something at the right moment — August 2009, early in the personal development blogging wave, when people were still discovering that you could find this kind of content online. It got picked up, passed around, made it on digg and delicious (if you still remember those, you’re old), got linked from places I’d never heard of. It was translated in Serbian, Italian, Japanese, even Farsi. Traffic spiked in a way I hadn’t seen before.

But what I was soon about to learn was that the spike isn’t the real benefit. The spike lasts a month, maybe two. What happens next is the interesting part.

The post just stayed. Kept getting found. Kept getting linked. Kept getting read by people who typed something into a search engine and ended up there. Seventeen years later it’s still one of the most-read things on this blog, and it still pulls traffic every single day.

Not to mention the fact that it was the basis for one of my 2 books translated in Korean – but let’s keep this story for another time.

The 100 Subposts

My response to the wave was probably the most useful thing I could do with it: I wrote 100 more sub-posts. One for each item on the list. Not immediately — this happened after about 2 years and it took a few months — but I did it methodically. Each item on that list got its own dedicated post, going deeper on that single idea. Accept your mistakes. Build self-discipline. Train your focus. One by one.

Most of those 100 posts got modest traffic. That was expected, in a way. You write one post, it works, and you think: lucky break, right context, right moment. You write 100 follow-up posts, most of which nobody notices immediately, and you keep going anyway — that teaches you something different and more durable: the wave is not the work. The actual work is the work.

Resilience and tenacity are words people use a lot in personal development. In my experience you don’t build them by thinking about them. You build them by committing to something after the excitement has passed and nobody’s watching. Those 100 sub-posts were that, for me.

What I Actually Lived

Going back through the list now, a few items I’ve genuinely kept for fifteen-plus years:

Accept your mistakes — still the right starting point, still first. The people I know who live well have this in common: they process errors fast and move on. The ones who struggle tend to carry theirs forward into every subsequent decision. I’d put this one at the top of any list I write in 2026.

Keep a journal — over two decades now, no structure, no system. Just writing down what’s happening and what I think about it. The post was right that this one is foundational, though for reasons I didn’t fully understand in 2009. It’s not documentation. It’s thinking clearly enough to put something in writing.

Start your own business — multiple times. The principle held. The 2009 version of what that looked like and the 2026 version are almost unrecognizable from each other, but the underlying logic — that having skin in something you built is different from collecting a salary — remains true.

What I’d Change

Some items from the list read now like the personal development culture of that specific moment rather than anything timeless. The relentless “do more, try this, start that” energy is everywhere in it — and I understand why. I was in expansion mode. The blog was for people who wanted to expand.

The list assumes you have capacity. It doesn’t mention rest. It romanticizes self-help. Doesn’t mention protecting what you already have instead of always adding. Those weren’t in the vocabulary of 2009 personal development. They’re central to mine now.

What 2026 Would Add

Not much, really. The post still sticks. If anything, I would just take out some of the topics in the previous paragraph, but I wouldn’t add anything.

The Post Is Still Out There

Fifteen years of links, shares, and search traffic have kept this one alive in a way I didn’t plan and couldn’t have engineered. People still find it, still share it, still make it surface in Google search results, even in the AI Agents era.

The lesson I’d pull from all of it isn’t “write long lists.” It’s: write something genuinely useful, then keep working after the wave breaks. The wave doesn’t last. But if the work is good, the work does.