What 730 Days of Showing Up Taught Me
Two days ago, I demoed a marketing tool I built for founders.
It didn’t come out of nowhere.
I created it because I’ve been writing on LinkedIn every single day for two years. That’s 730+ posts. Not because I knew what I was doing, but because I made a choice to show up consistently.
It is probably the longest experiment I have undertaken. It’s “valent-love day” for you love birds out there, but this process didn’t start as love at first site. Quite the opposite. After the first week of starting, I thought “Geez, I don’t think I can keep this up.” By the end of month 1, I was ready to throw in the towel. The engagement was consistently dropping.
I got in my head. “I’m sure people are tired of hearing from me. I should just quit.”
Many days, I didn’t have anything to write. I forced myself to post regardless. Sometimes those posts ended up performing a lot better than the ones I planned for. One day 50+ reactions, the day after only 1. I’d send up a little prayer “Lord have mercy,” brush my shoulders off, and do it again the next day.
But while reactions and engagement are the obvious metrics, something unseen was happening underneath.
The 2-year journey has taught me something interesting about the bottom-up approach to building something useful.
If you don’t participate, you wouldn’t know what to build.
Without participation, you don’t develop your own taste. You become numb to what you’re seeing because you haven’t practiced enough to know.
With my goal of consistency on LinkedIn, I created my own scorecard.
I had a sense of what I wanted to measure. “Can I write 365 posts over the next year?” I wasn’t too bothered with the outcome. Once I built a cadence that allowed me to do that, it evolved to a new question: “Can I get better?”
With that, I studied what others were doing. Less than a year in, I started paying attention to hooks, CTAs, and images. I paid attention to what worked and didn’t work. I even started using images of myself a few months ago (even though it felt cringe), I did it anyway. In my second year, I joined masterminds of entrepreneurs using LinkedIn to build their business.
This evolved to “Can I maintain quality while spending less time on the parts of the process I don’t want to do?”
When you show up consistently, you generate genuine questions.
More importantly, you know the right questions to ask.
For me, it started off with “Can I pull this off?” evolved to “Can I get better?” and landed at “Can I maintain quality with less time?”
Each question led to the next solution, solving for consistency, then quality, and currently efficiency. Eventually, I built a tool that helped with all three attributes – consistency, quality, and efficiency. I did this because I couldn’t find anything out there that suited my needs.
Without participation, you’re at the mercy of other people’s taste and judgment. You don’t develop your own sense of what works.
Every LinkedIn guru says: “Plan your content calendar 3 months out. Build your brand strategy first. Know your positioning before you post.”
I zigged. I wrote every day for 730 days without knowing where it would lead. The tool I’m demoing now? Couldn’t have planned for it. It emerged from practice, not a top-down strategy.
Most people wait to participate until they “know what they’re doing.” They consume courses, read books, study case studies – searching for guarantees before they start. No one knows exactly how AI will play out. People are panicking, waiting for someone to tell them “the strategy.”
But here’s what I’ve learned: you can’t develop taste without volume.
You can’t know what to build without participating. The doing teaches you what the planning never could.
What started off as brand-building on LinkedIn to attract clients created a sandbox for me to experiment with the fast moving pace of AI.
So instead of waiting for someone to tell you where it’s all going, your best bet is participation.
Build taste through participation.
In an era, where getting answers is becoming more and more of a commodity, asking the right question holds a lot of value.
Developing taste helps you ask the right questions.
Here’s what I’m learning on the practice ground: Taste develops through volume, learning from experts, and skin in the game.
That’s what I did. I tied my action (daily posting) loosely to a high-level goal (build trust through writing). Then let volume, expert help, and accountability cultivate my taste.
Volume: I wrote 730+ posts over two years. Not because I knew what I was doing, but because I committed to showing up. Quantity created the data points to refine quality.
Experts: I followed someone doing what I wanted to do. Bought their class. Joined their group. Got 1:1 time. The free content got me started. Paying forced me to take it seriously.
Skin in the game (accountability): When you pay for something, you pay attention differently. I’ve found that coming out of pocket – whether it’s money, time, or reputation – increases commitment.
I’m experimenting with one consistent practice – daily posting. You might experiment with weekly demos, monthly events, daily outreach.
If you’re experimenting with something, here’s what I’d pay attention to:
Choose one thing to do consistently (daily/weekly).
Create your own scorecard. The scorecard I built was input-driven (posts per week), not outcome-driven (followers). What would your scorecard look like?
Don’t start from scratch. Find someone who’s doing it well, study their structure. Ask: who do I admire that I can easily emulate?
Do it for 30 days minimum.
If you’re struggling to be consistent, pay for accountability (coach, program, community).
Most importantly, be open to where it takes you.
I started writing to attract clients. I ended up building a tool.
Closing Reflection
Two years ago, if someone told me I’d be building and demoing a tool for founders, I wouldn’t have known what to think.
But consistency and participation developed my taste for what’s useful. It all started with a choice to show up daily.
Who told you to plan before you practice?
Start this week and notice what participation teaches you that planning never could.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. I have close to 1000+ real data points on what works on LinkedIn. If you’d be interested in writing on LinkedIn for yourself or business, reply and say “yes.” I have something to share with you.
