The Invisible Value
I think a lot about the invisible value of posting your thoughts online more freely. Invisible, because you don’t really know what will happen after you post.
The internet is this wild connection mechanism for ideas and people. It just flattens geography and time in a way nothing else can. You post something from your corner of the world, and there’s a high chance that some random person you don’t even know, living on the opposite side of the planet, will stumble upon it and be interested in what you have to say.
I recently posted this image with a quote I’d been thinking about. Took less than 5 minutes to make. Didn’t think much about it before or after posting. I’ve shared similar stuff before that resonated okay with people. Nothing major.
But this one flew off.
First, a few folks in India liked it. Then once the Valley woke up, it really picked up. Garry Tan from YC quote tweeted it, pushing it to over 1M views - more than my original post. Then Andrej Karpathy quoted that tweet, amplifying it further. Eventually it reached Elon, and he replied too.
About 3M+ views combining everything.
The funny thing is that I almost didn’t post it. I had this quote in my head for a while. Mulled over it for 3-4 days. Then thought the only way to get it out was to post it and be done with it. I dropped into Midjourney because I thought making it visual would be more interesting. I’m so glad I did. Sharing it just as a piece of text would’ve never worked as well.
I couldn’t have predicted or manufactured that chain reaction if I tried. Also the highest ROI 4 minutes spent in Figma (ever I guess).
For the longest time, I’ve held this belief, and I’ve seen it proven true over and over, that you really don’t know the true reach your work can have if it lands in the hands of the right amplifiers. It’s impossible to guess the reach of anything in advance. You just have to post. And for that, you have to be comfortable posting raw thoughts without overthinking.
Before, I used to wait for the perfect thought to form. The sabbatical has made it easier for me to be more liberal with posting stuff online. Now I don’t mull over something benign for too long. If it’s interesting, out it goes.
That’s because I have realized this important thing – People don’t react and respond to everything they see online. But they definitely see it. This is why you’ll mostly never know who all saw your stuff. But with any reasonable reach, you can safely assume it went around quite a bit.
I have proof of this as well. Often, someone will ping me saying they liked something I wrote. They don’t follow me. We’ve never spoken before. But they saw what I wrote because my tweet made it into their office Slack or their WhatsApp group.
Once you realize how much invisible value there is floating in the ether, you start understanding the mechanics of getting hard things done – Getting connected to a founder you don’t know, scoring a call with a busy VC who would never check their inbox, landing what seemed like an impossible job, cracking a new client or customer and so on.
Get good at understanding this invisible value, and then work on learning how to capture it. Just put your thoughts out there. Consistently. Without overthinking. You never know which random post might change everything.