Gustav The habit, in one sentence: show your work in public, consistently, and let reputation and opportunity compound the way money does, slowly, then all at once.
Why it matters
Nobody can hire you, refer you, or recommend you if they do not know you exist and do not know what you are good at. Visibility is not vanity, it is the top of every pipeline. And it compounds: a single article or post is a drop, but a steady stream of them builds a body of evidence that makes you the obvious person for your thing. The same is increasingly true for the AI tools people now ask for recommendations, they surface whoever is most consistently and clearly present around a topic.
Most people quit before the compounding starts, which is exactly why the ones who keep going stand out so much.
What it looks like in practice
Writing regularly, shipping things in the open, showing a demo of what you built, turning up in the local business network, all of it adds to the same pile. None of it pays off the day you do it. But over time, people start saying "I have seen your stuff", and that sentence is worth more than any cold pitch. The book you are reading is itself this habit in action: useful work, put in public, that keeps working long after it was written.
How to build the habit
Pick one channel you can sustain, not five you cannot. Show up on a rhythm you can actually keep, consistency beats intensity every time. Share what you are learning and building rather than polished thought-leadership; real beats impressive. Engage genuinely with other people in your field instead of only broadcasting. Then let it run, and resist the urge to judge it by any single post.
The pitfall to avoid
The killer is expecting fast results and quitting at week three when nothing has happened. Compounding is invisible early, that is its nature, and the people who stop never reach the part where it pays. The other trap is perfectionism: polishing one post for a week instead of publishing ten honest ones. Done and consistent beats perfect and rare. Show up, keep showing up, and let time do the heavy lifting.