After posting for a while on Twitter, I’ve noticed something interesting.
I have just under 8000 followers, at the moment. I’ve written around 7000 tweets. That means, on average, each tweet has attracted around one follower.
As I looked around to other small-to-medium accounts, that number seemed to hold roughly true. Most people have as many tweets as followers, and often, slightly more tweets than followers. Large accounts seem to break free of this ratio (especially celebrities & public figures) but under ~50,000 followers, it seems you need to tweet thousands of times to gain thousands of followers.
My initial reaction to this ratio was, “I wish I had known this sooner.” If I knew that in order to get 10,000 followers, I would need 10,000 tweets, I probably would’ve started tweeting more sooner. I post a lot now, out of sheer habit, but when I started tweeting, I was a lot more careful, trying to post something high quality each time.
But creativity is, and always have been, a numbers game. Consider the following:
A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during the first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw pots nonstop in every session. And although it was counterintuitive to his students, you can guess how his experiment came out: at the end of the course, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent the most time actually practicing their craft.
— Creative Confidence, Tom & David Kelley
You can’t catch my hustle
You can’t fathom my love, dude
Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers
That’s A Different World like Cree Summer’s
I deserve to do these numbers
— Spaceship, Kanye West
The lesson here: quantity, quantity, quantity.
When you’re making five beats a day, you can’t think about quality. When you’re trying to produce 50lbs of pottery, you can’t think about quality. You have to totally surrender to process.
Any quality that emerges will come as a surprise. Greatness cannot be planned. It is an emergent property of consistent output.
I’m considering jumping into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. It’s the same principle: write a 50,000 word novel in a month, for the pure purpose of making something. It almost certainly won’t be good; that’s not the point. The point is to sidestep the inner critic, to overwhelm the inner critic to the point that it simply surrenders.
The ultimate creative question, then, is not “how do I produce something beautiful?” but rather “how do I produce as much as possible?” Then we trust that the beauty will emerge. We accept that it’s not up to us. Our job is to show up and create.
If you want 20,000 followers, you’ll likely need to write 20,000 tweets. So might as well write the first one today.
With love & appreciation,
Scott