Read time: 3 min.

Right now I'm sitting outside watching a snail cross the garden tiles.

No rush. No destination. Just moving at exactly the pace it wants to move at, completely unbothered by everything it isn't doing.

I haven't looked at my phone in over an hour.

And this, genuinely, feels like the best possible use of my time right now.

The high

Two weeks ago I was living on something I'd never felt before.

The book launch, the rankings, the numbers that kept coming in, it was the kind of high that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't felt it. Pure excitement, pure reward, pure disbelief all at once. The accumulation of months of work releasing in a single week.

It was sweet as honey. And then some.

But then, as everything does, it started to settle.

The pull toward the next thing

Here's what I noticed almost immediately after the peak.

The itch. That familiar restlessness that starts whispering about the next project, the next idea, the next thing to build. Momentum is addictive. When something works, every part of you wants to keep going, to pour that energy straight into something new before it dissipates.

I know that feeling well. And I know what happens if I follow it too fast.

So I made a decision.

Not yet.

The soft landing

Every day this week I've been walking for at least an hour. No podcast. No planning. Just moving and letting my body recalibrate after months of running at full capacity.

It sounds simple. But for someone who defaults to doing, it requires the same conscious effort that launching a book does. The pull toward the next thing is always there. The soft landing doesn't happen by itself.

You have to choose it.

And I'm choosing it. Because I've learned, slowly and not without mistakes, that the quality of what comes next depends entirely on how well you land from what just happened.

Child-like freedom

The launch was incredible. The rankings, the sales, the messages from people who found something in the book they needed, all of it was beyond anything I could have planned for.

But that's not what I was building toward.

What I was building toward is this. Sitting outside on a warm afternoon with nowhere to be, watching a snail take its time and feeling not a care in the world about it. To know that when the next beautiful project appears on the path, I'll pick it up on my own terms, with a full tank, because I chose rest instead of rushing.

So not the launch. Not the number 14 on Amazon. Not the 2,000 copies sold in week one.

A snail on the tiles and nowhere else to be.

This is the child-like freedom I’m after.

Much love,

— Martijn

P.S. The book is still out there finding its people every day. If you haven't picked up a copy yet: connectwithgrowth.com/#book