What the Llama Taught Me About Growth
Why following your curiosity beats optimizing for reach
Carolina posted a photo of a llama she met in Peru. “I made a new friend 🦙.” That’s the whole note.
628 reactions. 53 comments.
Our best-performing business content? Around 30-40 reactions.
I stared at this data for a while. A llama outperformed every framework, every insight, every piece of “valuable content” we’d ever created. By a factor of ten.
This should be discouraging. It’s the whole point.
After I published the Notes Playbook recently, my DMs filled with a few versions of the same question: “Okay, but what are you doing?”
Fair. I gave you the framework. I didn’t show you what it looks like in practice.
So I pulled our data. Notes, engagement, DMs, posting patterns. I wanted to see what was working.
Our engagement numbers aren’t impressive. Most notes get between 5 and 30 reactions. We don’t go viral. We’re not gaming any algorithm.
And yet. We crossed 25,000 subscribers. Our paid community keeps growing. People show up on sales calls already connected to our Harmony Map Framework, already trusting, ready to work together.
Because the quiet majority isn’t engaging publicly. They’re watching how we treat people. They’re paying attention to whether this feels performed or not.
In the Notes Playbook, I talked about how the strategy only works when your nervous system isn’t fighting you. How Carolina trained herself to enjoy connection by following what she loved first, then adding the strategic layer.
This essay is the other half of that conversation. Not the system. What makes the system work.
I’m not doing any of this because it’s a good growth strategy. I’m doing it because I’d get bored otherwise. Following my curiosity toward people I want to know is the only version of this work that doesn’t drain me. In fact it can keep me going for hours on end.
The tactics I shared last week work. But they only work if you mean it.
Here’s what that looks like.