Becoming Someone's Favorite
How to become someone’s favorite?
There’s a famous blog post from Kevin Kelly (Founder of Wired Magazine) called 1,000 True Fans.
If you’re a creator or entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard of this framing. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth the 5 minute read.
The tl;dr is that in order to make a full-time living as a maker (creator/artist/musician/filmmaker) you only need ~1,000 true fans.
The idea is that these true fans are super fans and would buy anything you sell.
~$100/year profit *1,000 true fans = $100,000/year income for the maker
I’ve always found this concept fascinating…because 1,000 is not a huge number.
Last month alone, my videos were viewed ~6M times by 4.5M unique people.
Now the funny thing about “general fandom” is that you might not even be someone’s favorite thing in a category.
It’s likely that every person on earth is a “super fan” of 3-5 people/brands/movements/things.
So the more interesting question to me is…how do you become someone’s favorite? Their #1.
In theory, being someone’s favorite is an even more elevated level of true fandom. The most rarified air in the world.
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, because at the end of the day, ”# of True Fan Favorites” is probably the only metric that actually matters for a creator.
Said another way, “How many people would rank you as their favorite person across all categories?”
In my mind, the recipe to achieve this rarified air is simple:
🎯 | Make stuff in a category someone cares about
👩🏻🚀 | Be 100% authentically yourself (a true one-of-one personality that they can’t experience anywhere else)
👀 | Give them complete behind-the-scenes access to your journey
🤗 | Acknowledge their dedication when you have the chance
📆 | Do this for years with relentless consistency
If you do these 5 things for long enough (some ofc harder than others), you will become some person’s favorite person.
Stack enough “True Fan Favorites” up over time, and you’ll eat forever.
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