Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Going Viral.
A short read.
Serendipity, felicity, and fortune are all synonyms for luck. For the longest time we’ve tried to game the system, there are many articles here that tell you to write an x amount of words and you’ll have success, publishing in a certain publication will make you go viral.
That’s the issue here, most of us want to go viral. It’s a pop-culture thing, Lil-Nas X, Addison Rae, and several other new-age celebrities went viral through a song, TikTok, or any other platform/way.
The Issue with Going Viral.
How many Lil Nas X songs have you heard recently? Lil Pump? You’re not skilled if you go viral, and if you’re not skilled, you’re not sustainable. Lil Pump fell off and is now endorsing an idiot that should lose.
Yet we all want to achieve some skyrocketing success and high heights, but does lasting success work that way? Look at Jay-Z, he’s arguably the greatest rapper of all time, in my opinion, he’s in the top 3, behind Eminem and Biggie Smalls.
At what age did Jay Z become a superstar? 26/27, he wouldn’t release his first album Reasonable Doubt until the age of 26. Jay Z is 50 years old and still as relevant in the game as someone like Kendrick Lamar.
When Jay Z talks people listen.
Now you don’t have to take forever to be successful, I’ve written this before, there’s no shame in being a late bloomer nor is there any glory in blowing up early.
Take a look at Nas. He dropped the Illmatic at the age of 20 and it’s considered as one of the greatest rap albums of all time, then in 1996, aged around 22, he dropped It Was Written, which went on to go double platinum in two months.
What’s the main difference Nas, and Lil Pump?
Nas Vs Lil Pump.
Let’s face it, Lil Pump isn’t the most skilled rapper, nor is he intelligent, the guy got famous off a song where he says “Gucci Gang” 53 times in a single song, the rest of the song is just him saying lean, grandma and meds.
His hit song Gucci Gang wasn’t a song, it was him talking over a catchy beat, this trend caught on, and he went viral. Nas is skilled, his first album had hits on hits, everyone has heard of the song the N.Y State of Mind, it has several other good songs such as life’s a bitch.
Nas was able to sustain his career because he was super-skilled at a young age, Lil Pump caught on a trend of mumble rap which is not as strong as it was in 2017.
With that being said, some many rappers and musicians are better skilled than Lil Pump, but why don’t they make it? Let me answer this question with an analogy, luck is like a bus, it comes to a particular stop every 15 minutes, but to get in, you have to have the right ticket. Some of these artists are skilled but not skilled enough, some of them may have to wait a little longer for the bus to arrive.
What You Should Aim For.
So we have established that going viral isn’t great, so you’ll have to do the work to become skilled and becoming skilled at something can take time, but the time can be shortened by working intensely.
You see success is a numbers game. The more articles you write, the better you’ll get, now you could write an article every day, so I started on Medium in late June. It’s November now, and I have published 124 stories, and I have 43 drafts, most of these drafts are failed attempts to write an article or an epiphany that I’m yet to chase.
I’ve noticed a trend, my first 100 articles felt hard to write, and I wrote a lot of them in July, August, and September, some of these articles were good, some of them were bad, but, I’ve noticed that my writing has improved, I owe this to the fact that I crunched in a lot of articles, and I’m thankful for that. Additionally, I’m working on being a better marketer and editor, the more I write, the more I edit and the more I edit, the more I publish, which means I am forced to market my work more.
So to gain the lasting success you should aim to be extremely skilled by intensely churning out work and practising a lot.
An Additional Way to Become Better.
I did not write a lot in October, and that was a good thing, because it gave my mind to reflect, and reflection is really important to produce high-quality art. More often than not, a writer will churn out a gazillion crappy articles, and without reflecting. If he does this, he’ll end up a crappy writer.
I’ve put all my reflections in this article:
I was writing a lot in the first three months to little avail, I still write, but, my articles get more claps and reviews because I took the time to reflect on the how I could make the quality of my work better and how I could market my work better.
Don’t worry about going viral, worry about getting better and becoming skilled. Mastery does not necessarily have to take time, and I don’t consider myself a master, but Nas is, and he recorded a lot of songs, the more he wrote, the better he got, to avoid burnout and diminishing returns, you should reflect, take some time out with a pen and paper to brutally criticise your work.
To those of you that are willing to do this, as my favourite Youtuber Captain Sinbad would say, greatness is coming.