For most people today, building an audience means choosing a platform, showing up daily, learning the rules of visibility, and adapting to algorithms.
Slowly, sometimes painfully, you accumulate attention.
This approach can work, but it rests on a fragile premise: that being seen is the same as being known for something.
There is another path that has always existed alongside this one. It is the path of building a body of work before building an audience.
Instead of asking how to grow on a platform, you ask what is worth creating so that growth becomes a natural consequence rather than a daily hustle.
The difference is not tactical, it’s structural.
The platform-first path is built on rented ground. Your visibility depends on systems you do not control and incentives that reward speed, frequency, and surface-level engagement. You become a “LinkedIn person,” an “X account,” an “Instagram creator.”
Your authority becomes inseparable from the feed itself, and therefore fragile.
The body-of-work path begins with the decision to create something that can stand on its own: a book, an album, a film, a serious research project, a coherent philosophy, a piece of craftsmanship that requires time, solitude, and high standards.
The kind of work that doesn’t exist to fill a schedule, but to express a vision. Something that would still have meaning even without algorithmic amplification.
In this model, social platforms are not the arena in which your value is produced. They are merely the place where that value is displayed and talked about.
They function as distribution, not as the source of legitimacy. People don’t follow you because you are constantly visible. They follow you because you have made something that impressed them, moved them, or changed the way they see the world.
This is how most lasting reputations have always been formed.
Authors are known for their books before their opinions, musicians for their records before their personalities, and filmmakers for their films before their interviews.
The work creates the authority. The audience gathers around it.
The distinction matters more now than it did a decade ago. Platforms are saturated. The cost of attention has risen, while the half-life of content has shortened.
More people are producing, more often, with fewer barriers to entry and greater pressure to be noticed. Competing in this environment by increasing output alone leads to a race that never truly ends. The result is a cycle of perpetual attention-chasing.
A body of work, by contrast, has compounding value.
It signals depth without requiring constant self-assertion. It gives context to your ideas and weight to your voice. It allows people to encounter your work as something whole and deliberately crafted, rather than as fragments competing in a feed.
At a deeper level, the two paths answer different questions.
The platform-first approach asks, “How do I grow?”
The body-of-work approach asks, “What is truly worth building?”
One optimises for reach. The other optimises for permanence. One is concerned with being seen. The other is concerned with creating something that deserves to be seen.
This is not an argument against using social media.
It’s an argument for reordering priorities. The question is not whether to post, but what the posting is in service of. Are the platforms the centre of gravity, or are they simply the channels through which you promote your work?
For anyone building a career today, whether in business, art, research, or thought leadership, the practical implication is the same.
Instead of asking how to grow faster on a given platform, ask what kind of work you could create that would justify an audience in the first place.
A book that clarifies your thinking. A body of creative work that demonstrates your judgment, taste, and discipline. A system that reframes how your industry approaches its problems. A philosophy that makes sense because you have lived and tested it.
The most reliable growth strategy now is not to optimise for reach, but to build something with enough weight to generate its own momentum.
Until next time, keep creating!
Omara
