The Law of Large Numbers: A Curse or Blessing

One of the big goals of 2024 was growing my X aka Twitter follower count after taking the excellent Art of Purpose’s “Masterclass 24/7”. I was lamenting how my follower count was stagnant for years. But I started learning the reasons why and was able to fix this slowly. My follower count did grow steadily. Just not as fast as I wanted. I was really jealous of friends of mine, like Anthony Pompliano, Sheel Mohnot or Nick Huber or others who were crushing it on X with follower counts of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases multiple millions.

Then I went to reread Tim Ferriss’ “11 Reasons Not To Become Famous”: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/. This quote from there does a good job explaining the Law of Large Numbers that work for and against you: “the bigger the population, the more opportunities and problems you will have. A small, self-contained town in Idaho might not have a Pulitzer Prize winner among its residents, but it probably doesn’t need a SWAT team either. 

But let’s assume you only have 100 or 1,000 followers. You should still wonder: At any given time, how many of these people might go off of their meds? And how many of the remaining folks will simply wake up on the wrong side of the bed today, feeling the need to lash out at someone? The answer will never be zero.”

This is the law of large numbers. Yes, there are crazy good benefits and upside. But like all forms of leverage, also a heck of alot of downside. The more employees you have, the more likely some of them will suck or cause issues or will be lazy or will steal from you or sue you. The more people you date, the more likely someone is bound to be a psycho. It’s just plain statistics and odds.  

I know for every 100 customers in a business. 10 will at least love you to death. However, at least 10 will hate you no matter what you do. It’s the same with social media and your audience. So multiply this percentage to your social media following. If you have 5000 followers, anything you post, there is a good chance at least 500 folks will hate it. It is what it is. Think of how insane the DMs and hate would be for someone with a million followers. Not sure we humans are well wired for dealing with that. But we are adapting slowly.

I also started listening to Canadian billionaire Andrew Wilkinson on several podcasts, as well as read his excellent book “Never Enough” and it was instructive. You think once you hit a number (in this case money), then all your problems would be solved. But as we all learn the hard way, this is never the case. As the song goes “Mo money, mo problems.” We are anxiety machines, whatever you get or have, you will still be stressed and still be unhappy for other reasons. It’s just a number at the end of the day. 

Putting this all together, my point to all this: Be happy with where you are and what you have. God has a plan and you are where you are supposed to be. So try to enjoy your ride up. And be aware of the downsides when you get to where you want to get to.

And to my starting point: You absolutely do need to grow your audience count as this is key to personal branding and distribution. Having a direct line to potential customers or partners. This will be one of the critical factors of longevity in this new world of business and entrepreneurship.