Present is not the same as found

A retired teacher in Al Khobar builds model dhows by hand, and he has posted a short video of his work every day for eleven months.

The advice his nephew gave him was simple. Keep going. Consistency wins. Sooner or later the right people will find you.

It was good advice for a smaller world. When there were a few hundred things to look at, persistence meant that eventually you became one of them. Stay at it long enough and the audience walked past your door.

That world has gone. The number of things being made and posted every day has grown far faster than the number of people with time to look. Most of what goes up today will be seen by a handful of people, and plenty of it by nobody. The far end of the curve has stretched so far that it is barely a place at all. Being out there is very close to not being anywhere.

So eleven months of daily posting is, for most people, eleven months of talking in a room that keeps getting bigger while the crowd stays the same size. Persistence still matters. It is simply no longer a plan on its own.

The boats are beautiful. That was never the problem. The problem is that being present and being found have quietly come apart, and more presence does not join them back together.

What joins them is one person telling another. A model so particular that a buyer puts it where every guest will ask about it. A small group of people who care about the same thing and gather round the person who makes it.

Those take far longer to build than a daily post. They are also the only things that get anyone found.