Are We There Yet????????
How many Medium articles do you have to write, to get to the top 1%?
“90% of podcasts don’t get past episode 3. That’s 1.8 million who quit. Of the 200.000 left, 90% will quit after 20 episodes. That’s another 180.000 gone. To be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world, you only need to publish 21 episodes.”
Creative success is a numbers game. Whether you like it or not.
When we think about creative geniuses, we like to picture them as deep thinkers, who work on their one masterpiece meticulously. They agonize and correct until their masterpiece is finally polished, finished and perfect.
This is total BS.
Most successful creatives were mass-producers. They created painting after painting, composition after composition, story after story, poem after poem.
99% of what Picasso created was shit.
99% of what Mozart created was shit.
99% of what da Vinci created was shit.
99% of what anyone creates is shit.
What’s worse: From the remaining 1% another 99% is just average.
The success lies in the remaining 0.01% of outstanding, amazing work. But to get to this one piece, you have to create 10.000 pieces. It’s just maths.
Okay, maybe 1.000 will suffice.
Don’t believe me?
Picasso created 50.000 pieces of art during his life. How many have you seen hanging in galleries?
Mozart composed more than 600 pieces, but all we remember is the Moonlight Sonata.
Charles Schulz drew 17.897 Charlie Brown strips. How many do you think you’ll like?
Even when you don’t create that ONE masterpiece, you can be a successful artists, if you create enough output.
Barbara Cortland published 723 novels during her lifetime. When she died at 98, she still had 160 unpublished novels in her drawer waiting to be published. Non of them was a “masterpiece” per se. You’ve propably never heard of her, neither did I, even though I studied literature at University. She wrote romance novels, more than 800 versions of boy meets girl.
But was she successful? Well, she sold between 600 million and 2 billion books. Is that good enough for you? Or do you really need to be an Artist with a capital A to have fun?
So, let’s get back to my quesion:
How many Medium articles do you have to publish to get to the top 1%?
I have no idea. I guess, it’s less than you’d think. Most people suck at consistency and if you can stick around just a little longer, you have a great advantage in life.
My guess is, that 200 or 300 articles will do the trick. Write 1 article per day for the next 365 days and see what happens.
I don’t always stick with this. I try to, but then life happens. But I learned to get back to it. I improve my systems. Let’s see, where this gets us.
Your friend,
Charly
