Dormant Content Payoffs

2014... James Clear writes an article called "The Physics of Productivity."

Nobody cares. It sits on his website. He moves on. Writes other things.

Four years later.

A New York Times reporter stumbles across it. Links to it. A CBS producer reads the Times piece. Follows the link. October 16, 2018: James Clear is on CBS This Morning, launch day for Atomic Habits.

The article worked for four years while he forgot about it.

Here's what most people miss about content: the value isn't in the publish moment. It's in the surface area. Every piece you create is a net in the water. Leave it long enough, something catches.

The problem is we measure wrong. We score on immediate engagement. Posts get two days, then we move on. We never see the 2,000-day payoff.

James didn't build his profile by going viral. He built it by creating enough surface area that probability worked in his favor. Eventually, something caught.

The inversion: publish and forget is not abandonment. It's strategy. You can't predict which piece will catch. You can only increase the number of nets.

If you're only counting immediate wins, you're ignoring the dormant inventory doing work you can't see.

This is the Upstream Principle in reverse: plant upstream, harvest downstream. The Information Flow shows why timing matters less than presence.