The real game you should be playing online
If you live by the wins, you'll die by the losses.
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them Twitter (not Instagram) is the first place I started posting visuals. It’s also my “least successful” (I cringe at defining success by follower count…but let’s temporarily use this definition).
Over the last 4 years of regularly posting on X, my follower count grew to about 19,000. Nothing to complain about but half that growth happened in the first 6 months. It’s felt like a grind to grow the other half.
Then last week something happened. The algorithm gods in the matrix saw it fit to bring some attention to my X account probably during a perfect storm of the right person seeing the right content at the right time of day.
Thankfully I learned early as a creator that social media algorithms are fickle creatures (notice that my content didn’t change, the algo did). It’s a dangerous game to measure success by their metrics. So I’ve stumbled into playing a more infinite game. The game of showing up despite the outcome.
The 3 most important lessons I’ve learned in this game:
You will go on a winning streak
You will go on a losing streak
You won’t know when either will stop.
And this has happened to me in every platform.
The lesson here is not to keep showing up so you too can go viral. If you live by your wins, you die by your losses. I can cough wrong later today and the algo might shift its attention elsewhere.
The goal is to avoid judging your work entirely on likes, shares, and engagement. Instead frame your progress as a byproduct of showing up day in and day out, even if you don’t do it perfectly.
Love this reframing of the “game” from chasing spikes in attention to practicing steady presence. The contrast between those two X posts is such a good reminder that the work didn’t suddenly get better, the metric did, so anchoring identity in the showing up, not in the streaks, feels like the only sane way to sustainably create online.