Don’t make the moldy blueberry mistake

I love blueberries. (Who doesn’t?)

I usually buy the smallest container. After all, I’m just one person. But after weeks and weeks of eating that tiny container in two days like a feral toddler, I decided: it was time to level up.

The big container of blueberries happily accompanied me home. I ate some as I was putting them in the fridge.
And the following morning with my breakfast.
And the following morning.
And the following morning… they were moldy.

?!??!

Now blueberries should last more than a few days. It’s likely that there was a patch of moldy berries in there when I bought it, and that just spread pretty quickly to the rest of the container. But I make this mistake all the time:

• I really like blueberries, so I buy the biggest container, and then they spoil faster than I can eat them.
• I get into a good groove doing the weekly crossword I pick up at the library, so I buy a daily crossword calendar and do them every day for two weeks and then ignore the rest.
• I enjoy doing X thing, and then decide to supersize it because I like it, and then get overwhelmed / bored / burned out / exhausted / realize I don’t like that thing as much as I thought I did, and never do it again.

I see content teams make this same mistake all the time, too. Their weekly newsletter works for this audience, so why not start sending it out twice a week?! They’ve had some success with SEO, so let’s use AI to quadruple our blog output. That last influencer partnership went well, let’s partner with TEN influencers next time for 10x impact!!!

Except it doesn’t work like that. I’m not saying don’t double-down on what works. But sometimes what works isn’t just the format, but also the timing. I was annoyed that I was always running out of blueberries, but it turned out that I was actually buying the perfect amount for what I could eat before they went bad.

Content is the same way. When you find something that works, keep doing it. But don’t forget that “keep doing it” doesn’t always mean “ramp it up 10x and do more of it, faster.” Sometimes that can work. Sometimes it just leaves you with more moldy blueberries.