If you need a crowd cheering to keep going, you’ll quit the day the stadium empties.

Outside encouragement is excellent fuel right up to the moment it stops. People lose interest, the season ends, the group chat moves on, and if the whole engine was other people watching, you are suddenly sitting there with no reason to continue. The work itself did not change. Only the audience did.

Do one stretch of it with nobody knowing: no post, no update, no telling your friends. If it survives that week, it is genuinely yours, and applause becomes a bonus rather than the power supply. If it does not survive, better to find that out now than three years in.