The Path to a Massive Audience
One of the biggest problems with having an audience is having an audience. Not kidding. When you have any amount of people looking at you, I’m talking even a hundred, it’s easy to fall into one of two traps:
1. You treat views, subscribers, etc. as just numbers
2. You hyper-focus on certain individuals in the group
The first trap is a defense. You have no idea how to fathom one hundred, one thousand, or one million people interacting with your idea or your art, so you have to create this dissonance. The downside of this is obvious. Those are real humans on the other side, and views are a poor proxy for that. While this dissonance might protect you in the short-run, it will hurt you in the long-run.
The second trap is based in insecurity. You start thinking about all the people that could possibly be watching your videos or reading your essays. And you try to tailor your message so that it doesn’t offend any of them or makes them all proud or whatever. This is exhausting. You’re thinking about how to make your uncle proud, how to get Oprah’s attention, how to make sure your high school bully think you’re cool, and how to get that one gnarly fan down in the comments to be quiet.
