The Anti-Striving Cadence
Slow down as you succeed; trade two more years of grinding for eight years of work made out of love.
Counterintuitively, as Trahan's success grew he slowed down — smaller team, lower production value, more of himself — and settled on two videos a month. The thesis is longevity over intensity. He works it through a Tom Brady analogy: you don't need an MVP season every year, you need to keep coming back season after season, and even athletes get a ~6-month off-season. "Once a week is a treadmill I cannot sustain." He names the real obstacle as comparison (your same-start, same-size peer isn't slowing down) and reframes the trade explicitly: 100 videos made out of love over 8 years beats grinding 2 more years to burnout. Directly parallels Mark Rober's treadmill-speed-protection heuristic.
- Cut cadence when success rises, not when it falls — protect the quality that caused the success.
- Name comparison as the real cost of slowing down, then accept it.
- Optimize for coming back season after season (consistency), not for a peak every cycle.
- Reframe the trade: love-made work over a long horizon beats high-output work to burnout.
- Build in off-time the way athletes build in an off-season.
Emerged after the lower-cadence, more-personal penny series outperformed his higher-output work; articulated in the 2022 Colin & Samir interview as a deliberate "I'm done striving" decision.