Here's a helpful piece on compound interest: https://tynan.com/thekey/
As for social proof, here's the concept: your reputation consists of your greatest achievements, not your greatest failures. I'll use Jonathan Blow as an example. He's the creator of Braid. He will always be known as the creator of Braid. One huge massively loved breakout hit is all you need to cement your reputation as an outstanding programmer. You could work on a dozen things nobody's ever heard of before and after that breakout hit and it doesn't matter.
The tricky thing is you never know what's going to be big and successful and what's going to be forgotten. That's why most outstanding programmers swing for the fences. They make things that are BIG. They're ambitious. You're not going to become recognized for outstanding work by making yet another ECS system in Rust. It has to be a step above in some way.
That said, to make a big, ambitious, impressive ECS system in Rust, you need to understand the problem extremely well. You do that by making unimpressive ECS systems in Rust. See previous point about compound interest.
