“if you view it as you know I need to reach this certain amount of um followers or I need to make this much money in this amount of time um you're giving yourself these really short-term goals and... most people that want to reach these like really lofty goals they're not going to succeed and then they're gonna feel really bummed and start to feel deflated”

Lead with the long game — vanity-metric targets break you

Short-horizon goals — hit 10K followers by Q1, earn $X by month 6 — almost guarantee an ego-crash quit point if growth disappoints. Long-game framing ("I'm here for years, this has ebbs and flows") removes the trapdoor. The math is the same; the psychological structure isn't. Decide the time horizon first; everything else (cadence, expectations, recovery from rough weeks) follows.