Blockbuster 2.0: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content
Author Note: In 2013, I got the opportunity to become a columnist with Forbes.
At the time, I had already written for several publications including Entrepreneur.com. And, I had been featured as an Inc. 30 under 30 entrepreneur and a BusinessWeek 25 under 25 entrepreneur. So, I didn’t want or need to write an article just to get another logo in my bio. I wanted to create content that would deeply resonate.
Furthermore, in the past, I had been humbled after a 250+ post blog dying a quiet death. As a result, I was no longer under the spell of the “if you write it, they will come” illusion.
Fortunately, I came across a book written by a Harvard researcher that taught me a mental model that changed my entire trajectory as a thought leader:
Today’s Game Plan
I wrote about the book, what I learned, and how I applied it to my writing in an article, which is republished below.
At the end of this post, I share my top 6 lessons learned since the article was originally published. These lessons are for paid subscribers only. These lessons are half of this post’s length.
Original Article
Will this article be read by anyone?
That was the #1 question going through my mind as I pressed ‘Publish’ on my first Forbes article in April of 2013.
As someone with no email list or journalism background, my insecurity felt overwhelming. I feared my words would die the silent death of obscurity.
So, I made a crucial decision… I would go all in. I would improve each article until I couldn’t anymore. This meant that I would spend more than 50 hours per article.
The results of doing this over and over for each article have surprised me.
My articles have been viewed tens of millions of times with the average article now being viewed 150,000+ times. One article even got well over 2 million views in just one publication it was syndicated on:
How did this happen?
How did I go from almost no experience, no email list — in a world of information overwhelm — to having articles consistently seen by stadiums full of people in just a few years?
It all comes down to one mental model, which I will dissect in this article.
In my experience and from my research, collecting and learning the most valuable mental models in the world is a key strategy of world-class entrepreneurs and leaders. Because, the better our mental model of any domain is, the more likely we are to be successful in that domain. Even one mental model, like the one in this article, can be a complete game-changer.
But, before I dive in, let me give some context on why I’m writing an article on thought leadership when everything else I write is about learning.
Here’s why…
When other writers I follow have shared their underlying mental models, it has really helped me understand all of their writing better. So, I hope this article helps you understand mine.
Second, over the years, many people have asked me how they can write articles that are read millions of times and shared in top publications. Now, I can send this article as my answer. A longform article is the culmination of thousands of little decisions, and almost all of the decisions I make can be traced back to this mental model.
Finally, for the first time, I’m going to coach a handful of people on how to write blockbuster articles that inform and inspire. I’ll show you how to get hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of subscribers, and thousands of dollars from each article you write. If you’re interested in learning more, you can click here to complete a short survey.
With that said, let’s dive in…
The Story Of The Long Tail And Fat Head
In 2008, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote the New York Times bestselling book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The premise of the long tail theory is that content consumption is increasingly shifting away from a relatively small number of ‘hits’ at the head of the demand curve toward a huge amount of content in the tail.
In other words, there are more books, articles, movies, music, apps, and TV shows than ever. Therefore, rather than people watching a few things because that is their only choice, people will spread out their attention over all of the content. They’ll focus on the small, niche topics that are the most interesting to them.
The book was rated as one of the top business ideas of 2008.
Here’s the problem with it…
It was wrong — or at least half wrong.
The long tail theory is right because there are now more options in every category. There is more media of all types being produced than ever before.
The long tail theory is wrong because most of the overall attention is being concentrated in the blockbusters in every medium.
Research of the data by Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse shows that blockbuster content is receiving a larger percentage of the attention pie than ever in all entertainment categories including publishing, TV, music, sports, movies, comedy, and opera:
“Rather than bulking up, the tail is becoming much longer and flatter… Meanwhile, our research also showed that success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve.”
Increasingly, the top media companies are focusing on fewer, high-quality titles and those titles are monopolizing attention and being enjoyed more.
The early pioneers of the Internet thought that it would be a great democratizer. 30 years later, the Internet appears to be the greatest centralizer in human history (read Attention Merchants for more on this).
What happened here?
Below are the 7 reasons why blockbusters are taking over, and why you as a thought leader should adopt the blockbuster mental model as the center of your strategy.
#1: The Web Operates On A Rich Get Richer Basis
This is the central reason that the blockbuster model is so powerful. In markets where there is a winner-take-all dynamic, it’s best to have a model that focuses on becoming a winner, because winners receive disproportionate rewards.
Below are charts that show the top 100 most shared articles for a variety of niches (Source: Buzzsumo). Do you notice any commonalities? These are not normal bell curves where most of the content has roughly the same number of views.
Rather, a small amount of content accounts for a large majority of the traffic. And 50% of articles get 8 shares or less.
The higher quality something is in terms of the underlying ideas and how it is packaged, the more likely it is to be shared over and over, which then makes it more likely that other publications will syndicate it, republish it, promote it through their social media and email channels, write about it, and feature it on their frontpage.
Furthermore, there is a growing body of curated newsletters, message boards, apps, and sites that look for the best content on the Internet to feature. Take Pocket for example. Every day, they send a newsletter to their tens of millions of subscribers and recommend articles online.
Finally, we humans are fundamentally designed to consume things that are popular. In other words, we make decisions based on social proof. The more our friends read an article, the more likely it is that we will read it. In one particularly surprising study, researchers created a fake “music market” where study participants listened to songs from unknown bands. Simply by changing the initial leaderboard, researchers were able to change what songs became most popular.
In other words, the Internet is just one giant positive feedback loop…
By understanding this phenomenon, I made the decision to focus on quality over quantity. With each article, my aim is to write the best article that has ever been written on the subject. And, we’ve designed our process over the years from the ground up to make this happen.
Now, I spend over $1,000 per article on researchers, illustrators, editors, and proofreaders. I also spend dozens of hours of my time, which is split between reading several books, writing the actual article, and editing it 15–20 times.
Side note: Because of the impact mental models like the Blockbuster model have had on my own life, I co-founded the Mental Model Of The Month Club last year. Every month, we provide a 15,000 word mastery manual and masterclass on the most important mental models in the world. If you want to learn faster and make better decisions, you can try out the club free for 7 days.
#2: There Is Much Less Competition From People Creating Blockbusters
At first glance, attracting attention online feels impossible.
There are millions of other people creating content daily. How can you possibly stand out?
Here are the two secrets I’ve learned that answer this question. First…
There is a lot of competition for mediocre articles. Almost all article writers dash off their content in an hour or two. You know these articles… ones that give a list of life tips like “get sleep,” “eat well,” and “be nice” without really bringing anything new to the table.
There is almost no competition for blockbuster articles. Almost no one spends dozens of hours on every article to make it the best article on that topic in the world.
Second, in the world of movies where the blockbuster approach is considered a best practice, it is almost impossible to create a blockbuster hit starting from scratch. You need $100M+ dollars, A-list celebrities, and the most talented people in the world.
In the world of online content creation, the blockbuster approach has not yet become a standard practice. Therefore, the barrier to creating blockbuster content is very low. You can create a blockbuster article in 50–100 hours, at zero financial cost, and be a mediocre writer. 50 hours is doable at the same time that it is enough to deter almost all competition.
This gap is your opportunity. And, this unique opportunity will not be open for a long time, as more and more people figure out how powerful the Blockbuster mental model is.
#3: Blockbuster Articles Build Your Reputation
A large part of the success of any given article is the name of the author. The same exact content will have a wildly different level of success based purely on who wrote it. In other words, the messenger is the message.
For example, I just saw that Kanye West tweeted the following recently:
Nearly 3,000 people saw this seeming gibberish and resonated with it so much that they decided to share it with everyone that follows them. On the one hand, this is funny. On the other hand, it says something deep about how the human psyche works.
This phenomenon has been widely studied in the academic world. Research shows that with any given academic article, the reputation of the authors have a big impact on the article’s initial success. The same holds true for content in general.
For example, every time I see a new Malcolm Gladwell or Nassim Taleb article in my newsfeed, I feel a rush of excitement. I immediately stop whatever else I’m doing to read it, because I’ve loved all of their past writing. In fact, I’ve even shared their article before I read it. Why would I do this? The answer is in the status update I made at the time:
Just saw that Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article came out, and I’m really excited to read it.
On the other hand, if I see an article from someone I’ve never heard of, I’m probably not going to click over, unless there is a really compelling headline or it was shared by multiple people in my network. Even worse, if the article is by someone who has written mediocre content consistently, it will take even more to get me to click over. In other words, if you write mediocre content, you are digging yourself a ditch.
Every time you share content online, you’re training your readers to either ignore you or stop what they’re doing and read you.
Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most successful nonfiction authors ever, has built his brand through the blockbuster model. Rather than focusing on writing an article a week, he’s focused on writing seminal articles and books, which means he only writes a few articles per year and two books per decade.
As a result, Gladwell releasing an article is an shareable event unto itself.
#4: Blockbuster Articles Create True Fans
All shares are not created equal.
It’s one thing for people to share an article on Twitter, because it passes some minimum threshold of interestingness.
It’s a whole other thing when a blockbuster article completely flips someone’s reality on its head and changes the way they see and interact with the world. When an article does this, a few things happen:
They share your article with much more passion.
They keep referring back to it for years.
They will tell everyone they can over and over.
They even write you to tell you about the impact it had on their life.
They will be likely to buy a book or course from you in the future.
Tim Urban, creator of WaitButWhy, shares how high-quality, longform articles helped him go from zero readers to 87M page views in 19 months.
“We took a bet that long but really thorough, really high-quality articles would not only be acceptable to certain people but would be a really fresh, standout thing in a current world of really short list articles. And that smart people would start reading it, and would keep reading it and get to the end. Then they'd want to share it, even more than if it were a great short article."
Just 19 months after the site began, that bet has paid off in spades. Along with influential readers like Musk and Harris, Wait But Why now has numbers any other startup blog would be envious of: A total of 31 million unique visitors and 87 million page views, with monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views, according to Urban...
Unlike viral churn-and-burn content sites, which post dozens of articles a day, WaitButWhy has only published just over 80 articles in total. That’s an average of just one a week; 63 of them are pieces that stretch to over 2,000 words, with some reaching more than 3,000.
—Tim Urban, WaitButWhy
Bottom line: One true fan is worth 1,000 social media followers.
#5: You Will Develop An Amazing Body Of Work
If every article you write is a blockbuster, then when someone discovers one of your articles, they’ll want to devour all of your others as well.
On the other hand, if you have hundreds of mediocre articles, people won’t spend their precious time going through each one. To show the power of a body of work, Shane Snow’s brilliant book, Smartcuts, contrasts two videos that went viral:
Paul Vasquez’s Double Rainbow (45M+ views)
Michelle Phan’s Bad Romance Makeup Video (55M+ views)
At the time that these videos went viral, Paul only had ‘made-at-home’ style videos while Michelle had a whole library of videos just as high quality as the one that went viral. After the videos, Paul continued to make videos, but none of them went viral. On the other hand, Michelle’s career took off as people discovered her body of work. Several years later, Michelle has a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Her Youtube channel has 9M subscribers while Paul’s has 44,000.
#6: The Blockbuster Model Makes You A Better Writer And Thinker
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
― Flannery O’Connor
Which do you think is going to make you a better writer:
Dashing out articles and pressing ‘Publish,’ or…
Being very deliberate with each article, learning from the masters, breaking down the writing process into its core components, getting honest feedback from multiple people, and doing everything you can to make the article great.
By having a blockbuster strategy where you invest time in research and deliberate practice, each article makes you smarter. It also makes you a better writer. So, even if your initial article doesn’t take off, your future ones have a higher chance of blowing up.
Top thought leaders invest the time to build a solid and unique foundation of ideas, and they reap the rewards. Each article is a stepping stone for future articles.
#7: People Spend More Time Reading Blockbuster Articles Than Other Articles
The more time you put in, the better the article becomes. The better the article becomes, the more time people will spend reading it.
The data proves my point…
According to Medium’s Datalab division, doubling the time spent drafting articles corresponds to an 89% increase in Total Time Read.
It’s another feedback loop:
To Create Blockbuster Articles, Think Like Warren Buffett
No matter how obvious or proven the blockbuster mental model is, following it is hard. Almost everyone I tell the approach to nods as if they get it. But very few people actually do the hard work.
And, I get it. Even as I write this article, I fear that all of the time and money I invested will not pan out. It’s scary to spend so much time on something that might be a complete dud.
Putting all of our eggs in a few baskets feels more risky than spreading them out. In other words, it feels less risky to write five mediocre articles than to write one blockbuster article.
But, the reality is that mediocrity is more risky.
So how do we train our minds to be OK swinging for the fences on each pitch?
I think we should think like investors, and more specifically like the best investor in history — Warren Buffett.
Early in his career, Buffett discovered the power of the blockbuster mental model and adopted the strategy of only making 1–2 investments per year. In other words, Buffett only swings at pitches when he thinks he can hit a home run.
The following quote from Buffett captures the essence of how we can use the Blockbuster model:
I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches — representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.
As a writer following the blockbuster mental model, I’m aware that I can only write 1–2 blockbuster articles per month. So, at the beginning, middle, and end of each article, I constantly ask myself and others, “Does this have the potential to be a blockbuster?” As a company, we’ve designed our whole process around that answer being yes!
We live in a media world with winner-take-all dynamics. In this world, a strategy that doesn’t maximize your chances for a home run is the most risky.
Blockbuster 2.0: My Top 6 Lessons After 10 Years (For Paid Subscribers)
Over the last 10 years, I’ve been surprised by the enduring power of the blockbuster mental model. In today’ increasingly noisy world, it is getting more and more important. As a result, it is now a must-have strategy.
On the other hand, I’ve been surprised by how few people actually follow it. This is an opportunity for you, because it means that the overall quality bar on the Internet is still fairly low. Therefore, it’s possible to write the best article that has ever been written on a topic within your niche within dozens of hours (if you’re already an expert). This shouldn’t be taken for granted. For example, consider the movie industry. To create a blockbuster movie, you generally need to raise tens of millions of dollars and recruit world-class talent.
So the question becomes, why do so many people understand the power of blockbuster content, but so few people actually create it?
Until we understand the hurdles that stop people, we will likely stopped by them to.
That’s why I’m writing this Blockbuster 2.0 portion of the post. My focus of the lessons below is to help you overcome the largest stumbling blocks I see people run into and give up because of. Furthermore, I confront the brutal truths about using the blockbuster strategy in today’s Internet climate.
I’m purposely staying away from the tactical here, and I’m focusing on the stumbling blocks because I’ve found that short-term tactics don’t matter if you don’t have them embedded in a strategy that you are likely to continue for the long term.
Below are key rules that I’ll be deep diving into:
Test out your big ideas before you go all in one idea
Play the long game and you will succeed
Super virality is surprisingly dependent on luck so buy lots of lottery tickets
Virality isn’t just between people sharing ideas they love
Algorithms have a disappointingly large impact on virality
Conquer perfectionism
#1. Test out your big ideas before you go all in one idea
Hardly anyone starts off with a blockbuster after their first experiment. Instead, the best way is to start off testing smaller versions of your big idea and then doubling down on the winners.
Brainstorm lots of ideas. I keep a library of dozens of article ideas on a spreadsheet on my computer. I spend about 30 minutes a day brainstorming new ideas.
Test an idea in your head. In other words, you brainstorm a lot of ideas. Then you narrow them down based on what you think makes sense based on your intuition of what will work and what doesn’t.
You can deliberately train your intuition through a process I call Idea Connoisseurship. I have spent thousands of hours studying and reverse-engineering the best article titles, Trademark Ideas, articles, books, etc.For the ideas that pass the first round, you invest more time. For example, you might put time into research. As you do research, you will shoot down some of your ideas, but one or two might pass the “Ok. It’s worth exploring this more.” filter.
Put in even more time and share your thoughts with other people to get feedback. I share my ideas with 5-10 people via one-on-one conversations with peers, feedback in my classes, feedback from an editor, and feedback from my time.
Write a short version of your article and get feedback. This step provides another helpful test.
Go all in. Spend dozens of hours building out your article.
Here’s what this all looks like visually...
So the big goal is the blockbuster. But to get to a blockbuster, we need to have many ideas, most of them mediocre or duds. And it goes all the way down. To have one great idea, we need to generate many ideas.
To take advantage of this model, you create a process in which:
You have many tiny experiments that are easy and fast to implement with your current resources (time, money, skills, network, etc.).
You take the winners of those experiments and create a higher-cost, more reliable, experiment.
And so on until you reach your blockbuster.
The model is an incredible way to maximize the quantity of experiments, so you can also maximize the quality while having the least waste and risk.
This is counterintuitive for most people, because most people think of quantity and quality as being opposite. But with this model, quantity leads to quality.
I first learned about this model of experimentation in the book Little Bets when author Peter Sims describes how top comedian Chris Rock goes about developing his comedy routines…
Comedian Chris Rock Case Study
First, Rock tests out lots of new jokes at a small club near his home in New Jersey. He actually shows up to the club with a notepad and has likened these kinds of “test” shows to “boxing training camp.”
Now, you can imagine what happens when patrons and employees see Chris Rock walk in. They feel they’ve won the comedy lottery. They think they’re about to see the best show of their lives.
Instead, Rock is subdued and casual as he tests his material. He talks with the audience rather than regaling them with his usual bombastic presentation. All the while, he watches their expressions and body language for feedback as to what material is landing with them and what’s falling flat. Toning down the energy of his sets helps to make sure he is getting accurate feedback on the jokes themselves rather than his delivery.
At these shows, most of the new material fails; the jokes fall flat. And the audience doesn’t give him a pass because he’s Chris Rock. They react the way audiences do when faced with a comedian who’s rambling or simply not funny. Rock may even admit onstage that something’s not working as he jots down notes.
But in that pile of failures, Rock’s fellow comedian Matt Ruby, who’s seen many of these practice runs, says a few lines land “like a lightning bolt.” These are the jokes that Rock goes on to develop further.
Out of hundreds of ideas, Rock is left with a handful that have potential. And since most stand-up jokes are long stories that have six or seven parts, it’s not just the story or topic he must test but all the moving parts of the joke.
By the time Rock finishes crafting a comedy special, every line that comes out of his mouth has been tested for six months to a year, five to seven nights a week. This process applies not just to Rock but to most top comedians.
Takeaway: Using the proven process in this step, you can avoid spending dozens of hours on one article and having a dud.
#2. Play the long game and you will succeed
As I study the career of blockbuster writers, even the ones who seem to come out of nowhere, I always find that there is a history of years of deliberate practice and experimentation that precedes their hit.
Therefore, if you’re looking to succeed as a thought leader and create amazing work, my top two recommendations are to:
Invest as much time into it every day as you can for as long as you can. I believe there is an exponential relationship between the amount of time someone spends and their odds of success. I will explain this in a future article.
Be deliberate about mastering the related mindsets, skills, decisions, workflows, and habits. I write about the fundamental skills in Blockbuster Blueprint: The Most Comprehensive Map Of Thought Leadership (Based On Thousands Of Hours Of Development).
Said differently, at the end of the day, the two core variables that determine your long-term success are time invested and improvement rate:
I sincerely believe that people who are deliberate about investing the time and improving over years are extremely likely to succeed.
Takeaway
So the question becomes, how do you play the long game when there are so many ups & downs? How do you persist through the beginning months or years where you don’t have much externally to show for your time invested?
I am increasingly convinced that having an Infinite Devotion is the answer. Having a higher Infinite Devotion will increase the intensity of how much you get done every day, it will increase the quality of what you create (passion is contagious), and it will lead to more longevity in your career as you have ups and downs. I explain the power of Infinite Devotion in the following article:
#3. Super virality is surprisingly dependent on luck so buy lots of lottery tickets
The optimistic part of me has always felt that there was a formula for virality that I could learn that would guarantee results.
For example, I thought that virality was somewhat like physics. When it comes to constructing a building, we don’t count on luck. We use the laws of physics to get an almost guaranteed outcome each time.
What I understand now is that hardcore virality, the type that makes someone’s career, is surprisingly rare and unpredictable—no matter how good we are at virality.
I first became aware of the research behind this phenomenon in the academic publishing field…
The Equal-Odds Rule Of Academic Publishing
Research of all academic papers ever published shows that there are equal odds of any academic paper someone publishes becoming a hit within their career. In other words, a researcher has an equal probability of writing a hit paper at 30-years old as they do at 60-years old. This pattern is known as the Equal-Odds Rule.
The following video summarizes the research:
In other words, skill/experience/reputation may be an important variable, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as important in academic research as one might expect.
The Equal-Odds Rule runs counter to the intuition that our results gradually improve as our skills and reputation increase over time. It is surprising because once someone unknown hits it big, you would expect their next books to become even more popular, because of the advantages they gain from a hit:
Everyone knows who they are.
They have true fans.
They know more about book publishing, about writing, and about their field.
They have more money to put into marketing.
Despite all of the advantages that come after a hit, most creators revert back to the mean. Having bigger and bigger hits over a career is unheard of.
These results are so confounding that even the original researchers were skeptical at first:
I just couldn’t buy that the Q-factor [odds of success] of creative individuals doesn’t change over time. Neither could the editors of the top journals where we sent the paper describing our discovery. Neither could the eight referees the journals asked to weigh in. Everyone was baffled. They asked us to recheck our findings and demonstrate their validity in all fields of science. We spent six months doing so. And we came to the same conclusion. So, as a scientist, I have no choice but to accept this at face value. Yet I continue to wrestle with the results as I try to understand what they really tell us about success, talent, and ability.
—Albert-László Barabási (researcher)
The Equal-Odds Rule Applies To Other Creative Fields
A 2020 follow-up study, Success and luck in creative careers, confirmed the suspicion for how important chance is across fields:
Personally, I wanted to resist the role of chance. Somehow, it felt disempowering.
But over time, I’ve come to accept the pattern as I see it in more places. For example, below is the graph I created of ten of the top nonfiction authors since 2010:
Rather than seeing anyone’s success gradually increase over time, we see a lot of randomness.
As a lifelong entrepreneur, I’ve also noticed a similar pattern. Many entrepreneurs who become extremely successful are one-hit wonders.
This all begs a question. What should be do about the Equal-Odds Rule?
Be More Productive
While the odds of any given work hitting it big are equal throughout one’s career, we increase our odds by simply producing more work.
With academic papers, there is a direct relationship between the quantity of papers published and the quantity of their hits.
The principal researcher behind the study explains:
There’s a simple analogy to explain this seemingly contradictory find. Let’s say that for thirty years you buy a lottery ticket annually, always on your birthday. Your chance of winning a prize doesn’t improve as you age. Nor does it decline. It’s the same now as it was five years ago, and it will be the same ten years from now. But if you buy thirty lottery tickets on your thirtieth birthday? Well, if you’re ever going to win the lottery, the odds are it’ll be in your thirtieth year. Our measurements showed that research papers are like lottery tickets in a scientist’s life. Each has exactly the same odds of becoming a breakthrough. So, in the period when a researcher publishes at his or her best pace—finishing project after project in rapid-fire succession—they tend to experience their greatest success. Not because they’re more creative during this burst of activity. They succeed because they try more often.
It just so happens that for most scientists, this burst of productivity comes during the first two decades of professional life. Eager after our studies, we spend our initial years churning out projects in a flurry of motivated activity. Then, after a decade or two, our output slowly tapers off. It’s the same in all creative enterprises. New opportunities open up that take us out of the office or the studio or the lab. We deal with midlife crises. Our children get into trouble; our frail parents absorb our attention. We burn out. We get distracted, our priorities shift, and our pace lags. In other words, late-career professionals tend to buy fewer lottery tickets, so they inevitably have fewer wins.
And so, by analyzing the data differently, we discovered that fresh-faced thinkers disproportionately break through not because youth and creativity are intertwined. They do so because on the whole, they’re more productive. Undeterred by disinterest or failure, young people try again and again. That’s why scientists write most of their breakthrough papers in their thirties, why many painters produce their most revered canvases in their twenties, why composers and movie directors and innovators and fashion designers tend to be youthful upstarts when they make it big.
—Albert-László Barabási (researcher)
Below are specific ways you can be more productive…
Takeaways
Do lots of experiments. When I first came across this research, it led me to embrace the 10,000-Experiment Rule, which I write about in Forget The 10,000-Hour Rule; Edison, Bezos, & Zuckerberg Follow The 10,000-Experiment Rule. The 10,000-Experiment Rule applied to thought leadership is that rather than just developing a few big ideas, you want to develop hundreds of small bets you can test rapidly, so you can double down on the dozens of best ideas, so you can go all in on the few that matter.
Be humble on your ability to predict hits. After researching creativity throughout time, one of my big lessons learned is that even creators themselves aren’t aware of their big ideas in advance. For example, Darwin sat on his theory of evolution for many years before he decided to share it. Therefore, I would recommend experimenting with as many ideas as possible, even ones that may not be your best ones based on your own intuition.
Be aware of the mid-life productivity slump. After coming across the research, I became extremely curious about why people’s creative productivity drops off in mid-life. So, I researched and wrote These 7 brutal truths about aging will help you get your shit together. As the saying goes, understanding the problem is half way to solve it.
If you have a huge hit, make hay while the sun shines. Appreciate the moment for what it is and capitalize on it fully before rushing to the next work. Speaking from personal experiences, when you have a hit early on, it is easy to think that the next hit is right around the corner when in actuality it is years away.
#4. Virality isn’t just between people sharing ideas they love
The conventional idea of virality looks like this:
Someone comes across an article
They read it
They share it
What I now understand is that the actual story of virality is more complex.
First, a huge percentage of people share content before they actually even read it.
In a fascinating study, a leading analytics company analyzed the reading and sharing behavior on billions of page views. The left quadrant in the chart below shows how most article sharing happens early in the article reading process, not after the person is done reading:
Takeaway: Creating viral content isn’t just about creating amazing complex ideas to share within an article. Rather, it’s also about creating amazing short value hooks that are shared in the newsfeed.
#5. Algorithms have a disappointingly large impact on virality
Whether it be social media, search results, or our email inbox, algorithms intermediate the relationship between the creator and the consumer.
Thus, changes to algorithms change what content gets shared and how it gets shared.
Below are a few of the algorithmic changes that are impacting how content gets shared:
External links are devalued. Let’s say you read an article on Forbes. Then, let’s say you then go over to Twitter and share the link. Chances are that it won’t do very well because Twitter and most other social networks heavily penalize content that simply links to an outside article. What this means is that it becomes harder to have a hit that spreads across social media.
Paid content is prioritized. As the social media and search industries evolved into maturity, they focused on profit. More specifically, they focused on prioritizing paid content over organic content. Thus, when you search for something on Google, the top several search results are paid. Furthermore, social media newsfeeds are filled with ads, which crowds out organic results. Finally, Amazon’s search result pages and book pages are now filled with sponsored results.
Quality is increasingly prioritized. Many platforms measure quality by a combination of engagement rate (i.e., likes, shares, comments, etc) and engagement length (how long people engage with the piece of content). As the quantity of content explodes while attention spans remain the same, the quality bar rises.
Implications
There are many implications of the shifting landscape, which have ever further implications like dominoes:
Many creators are frustrated by social media platforms. First, they don’t have a direct relationship with their audience. Second, the platforms have almost entirely removed the benefits of having followers, which creators have spent years cultivating. Next, it’s frustrating to constantly have algorithmic newsfeed changes that require one to make big changes to their work and strategy in order to stay relevant. Finally, creators barely get paid at all for their work.
Creators are moving to creator platforms. In the past, there wasn’t an alternative for creators to publish their work and get access to a big audience. So, creators published their best work on social media. But now, we are seeing the rise of creator platforms where creators are the customers rather than the commoditized suppliers. So creators are putting their best work on these creator platforms—often behind a paywall.
Sub-Implication: Social media platforms are moving toward creator monetization. Because social media platforms are dependent on high-quality content, they are increasingly experimenting with creator monetization. Although YouTube seems to be the only platform that has actually figured out how to do this.
Takeaways
Send out a regular newsletter that’s good enough to gain momentum. Compared to 8 years ago, I think the value of an email newsletter has increased significantly. In short, the value of a follower on social media has plummeted to zero while the value of an email follower has remained fairly constant. Furthermore, if you don’t share content to your email list on a regular basis, you will be forgotten by many of your subscribers. In addition, if you send out mediocre content, you will train your audience to ignore your emails.
Therefore, it’s critical to find the right balance for you where you have enough quality in your content that you rise above the newsfeed noise and not too much quality where you rarely publish anything and you lose all of your traction in between posts. I write more about the tension between quality and quantity in Quality-Quality-Quantity: How To Succeed Online According To The Highest Paid Writer On The Internet (Ben Thompson).Set aside extra time for blockbuster work. When you’re in the throes of sending out a regular newsletter on a deadline, it can be hard to create your very best work. Therefore, I recommend choosing a newsletter cadence where you have extra time that allows you to create your very best blockbuster content at the same time in the background.
Even if you can beat them, you still might want to join them. While I now believe that creators should host their main content on a creator platform, social media can still be an effective distribution strategy. This may mean slower growth in the beginning, but you’ll have a much more stable foundation.
As a general principle, one of the best ways to succeed on a social media platform is to understand what it’s optimizing its algorithms for and then copy that. With that said, it seems that social media platforms are moving toward valuing high-quality paid content hosted on their platform. This shift puts a higher level of importance on understanding marketing skills so you can make profitable ads and having a back catalog of highly converting products, so you can afford to pay a higher price per click compared to competitive ads.
Personally, I would only suggest paid ads as an advanced strategy AFTER you have a regular newsletter with proven traction and a suite of products you can upsell.
#6. Conquer perfectionism
Perfectionism comes in different flavors…
People have an unachievable standard for their work. As a result, they never achieve it no matter how much time they put in.
People get too focused on unimportant details. Some details are more important than others. If a creator is not careful, they can waste many, many hours on details that don’t actually move the needle.
Perfectionism can go so far that it turns toxic. For example, when it comes to appearance, it can lead to anorexia. When it comes to creativity, it can destroy the creative impulse behind our work, because we’re creating to not look bad and to please others rather than creating to express something deep inside of us that we want to gift to the world.
Because of the downsides of perfectionism, many content gurus recommend that creators focus of producing good enough content consistently. The problem with this advice is two-fold:
Good enough is almost always not good enough. The bar to capture people’s attention on the Internet is very high. Someone who is unskilled and who is not doing their best work will almost certainly not rise above the noise.
Being consistent doesn’t necessarily lead to motivation or improvement. If we post consistently, but don’t get traction, it can sap our motivation over time. It feels like we’re screaming into an abyss and ultimately just wasting our time. Furthermore, when we just repeat something over and over without intentionality, we quickly automate the task and stop improving. This is known as the OK Plateau.
Takeaway #1: Make sure your high standard is achievable
Longtime producer of the This American Life podcast, Ira Glass, gives sage advice:
Takeaway #2: Pre-decide what level of quality you want
To add nuance to the idea of quality, I created the following continuum:
What’s important to understand about this is that things are not black and white. There are many levels of quality that can work. What’s important is that the quality you choose is between the “Noise Line” and the “Perfectionism” line.
Takeaway #3: Understand toxic perfectionism
Researcher Brené Brown does a perfect explanation on the Oprah Show:
Takeaway #4. Confront legitimate fears
The people in the “good enough” camp sometimes make the case that all fear are illusions that are worth ignoring.
However, there are several legitimate and solvable fears. For example, you can…
Identify specific people you’re afraid will see it. Publishing online is awkward because of what experts call context collapse. When we communicate one-on-one, we tailor what we share and how we share it to the person we’re speaking with. But, on social media, when we publish something, everyone that follows us sees it. This can be our boss, peers, friends, in-laws, kids, kids’ friends, high school friends, and co-workers. Therefore, if we’re publishing content we don’t want specific people to see, it can make any online publishing awkward. There are two ways to solve this:
Reach out to those people individually and give them context on what you’re publishing and why.
Role-play scenarios within your own mind until you can find ways to be comfortable. For example, you can think through the worst-case scenarios and brainstorm solutions. Or you can accept that the person might not like your writing, de-friend you, and learn to be ok with that.
Refine your sense of what it takes for ideas to succeed online. When we’re not sure if our work is good enough, it can be hard to publish in the face of so much uncertainty. My #1 recommendation in this case is to become a connoisseur of the patterns of the top content online. I will post on how to become an idea connoisseur in the near future.
I’d give this a thousand likes if I could 🫶
Love the article and had difficulty grappling with your relevations given most are told to write for the algorithms (myself included). What are your thoughts on wanting to write a blockbuster with only a person or two in mind knowing that it could help them (then extrapolating it could impact others)?
And what are your thoughts on writing a blockbuster to help you think through a large problem or burning desire you want to learn or clarify for you only?