I came across this story in The Washington Post and wanted to share it immediately, not because it’s inspirational in the tidy, motivational sense, but because it quietly exposes how much of what we think are “rules” are really just expectations we’ve been trained to accept.

We’ve been taught to expect outcomes to follow a visible path. We’re conditioned to look for the mechanics first. The launch plan. The platform. The strategy deck. We’re taught that if the steps aren’t obvious, the result must be suspect.

And then a story like this appears.

The story is about Allen Levi, a nearly seventy-year-old, first-time novelist, and his self-published book, Theo of Golden. Levi wasn’t trying to build a platform or execute a launch. He was focused on finishing the book. No marketing strategy. No social media campaign. No concern for discoverability. Just an intense commitment to bringing something to completion that clearly wanted to exist.

And yet the book moved. Slowly at first, then steadily, then in a way that no one involved could fully account for.

That’s the part that intrigued me the most.

What We’ve Been Trained to Believe

We’ve internalized a very specific model of how success is supposed to work, especially in business, leadership, and creative work. The logic is so normalized that we rarely question it.

It goes something like this:

• Visibility precedes value
• Momentum must be manufactured
• Stillness equals stagnation
• If something isn’t moving, it needs pressure

Within that model, force isn’t just accepted. It’s rewarded. We praise hustle. We normalize urgency. We assume that louder, faster, earlier is always better.

So when something moves without those inputs, it creates cognitive dissonance.

Because if this story doesn’t fit the model, then the model might not be as universal as we thought.

What Actually Happened Instead

What keeps drawing me back to this story isn’t the sales numbers. It’s the sequence.

The work existed before there was any concern about reach. The story had density before it had distribution. People didn’t discover it because it was optimized for them. They encountered it because someone they trusted handed it to them and said, this did something to me.

That distinction matters.

The spread wasn’t engineered. It was relational. It moved through book clubs, emails, small gatherings, quiet conversations. One person at a time. Not as a spike, but as a chain.

And chains are built on trust, not tactics.

Why This Makes Us Uncomfortable

There’s a particular unease that surfaces when success can’t be reverse-engineered. When there’s no clean causal loop to study, we rush to explain it away.

We call it luck.
Or timing.
Or faith.
Or anomaly.

Anything that allows us to keep our frameworks intact.

Because if coherence can do more work than promotion, then some of the pressure we’ve normalized starts to look optional. If readiness matters more than reach, then some of the urgency we’ve internalized starts to look self-imposed.

And that’s unsettling in a culture built on acceleration.

The Question Beneath the Story

This isn’t an argument against marketing. It’s a question about order.

We’ve collapsed movement and readiness into the same thing. We treat quiet phases as problems to solve instead of conditions to respect. We start forcing momentum into places that haven’t finished becoming themselves yet, and then we’re surprised when what we scale feels thin, brittle, or short-lived.

Sometimes what’s actually happening is alignment… quietly doing its work underground… forming roots… waiting for conditions that allow it to travel intact rather than distorted.

There’s a difference between amplifying something and animating it. One responds to tactics. The other responds to coherence. And coherence doesn’t hurry simply because we’re impatient.

Some things don’t need to be louder yet. They need more time.

And when something is ready, it moves without being chased. When it isn’t, no amount of noise will make it arrive sooner.

That’s the part of this story that remains.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where in your work or leadership are you applying pressure simply because stillness feels uncomfortable… and what might change if you paused long enough to ask whether what you’re trying to move is actually ready to travel?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.