Let me paint you a picture. It's 11pm. You just posted something — an insight, a thread, a short video. You check the numbers. Seven views. Three likes. One of them is you, testing the link. You close the app and wonder if this whole thing is a waste of time.

It is not. But I understand why it feels like it.

Here is the thing about building influence in public: it doesn't look like influence while it's happening. It looks like talking to yourself. It looks like effort without reward. It looks, frankly, a bit mad to the people watching you from the sidelines — the ones who never post, never share, never put themselves out there, and who will, five years from now, ask you "how did you blow?"

This is the compounding law that nobody teaches in school because you can't test it on paper. Every post is a deposit. Every insight you share, every lesson you document, every honest thread about what you're learning — it goes into an account. And for a long time, the balance looks like nothing. Then one day, someone finds post number 47 and it changes their life. They share it. Someone with 200,000 followers sees it. Your account goes from zero to interest-bearing overnight.

But you have to make the deposits first. Consistently. Quietly. Even when the audience is four people and a bot.

"Showing your work" is not about performing intelligence or faking expertise you don't have. It is about documenting the journey in real time — the experiments, the failures, the things that worked and the things that embarrassed you. People do not follow perfection. They follow progress. They follow the person who is visibly, honestly figuring it out, because that person is doing what they wish they had the courage to do.

The danger is quitting in the gap — the long, uncomfortable period between starting and being seen. Most people don't lose the race because they ran the wrong way. They lose it because they stopped running when the crowd hadn't arrived yet.

Oya, keep running. The crowd is coming. Just not yet.