The crowd gets bigger when you win. Remember who was there when the stands were empty.

Attention follows results, which means most of the people around a win did not choose you, they chose the win. That is not evil, it is just how crowds behave. The ones who turned up before there was anything to see were making a completely different bet.

Text the person who came to the thing nobody came to. The one who read the bad draft, drove you there, sat through the version that did not work. Do it now rather than saving it for a speech.