In 1858, Isambard Kingdom Brunel launched the Great Eastern. It was the largest ship the world had ever seen and it was a masterpiece of iron and ambition. The maritime industry of the mid-nineteenth century operated on a singular logic. That logic dictated that scale was the only path to efficiency.

When the Great Eastern finally touched the water, there were no docks large enough to hold her. There were no ports deep enough to receive her cargo. The ship was a technical success and a commercial catastrophe. The advice to go big was sound for the future but it was fatal for the present. The context of the world’s harbors had been forgotten in the pursuit of the universal ideal.

The Mechanical Indifference of Success

I changed the battery in my smoke detector at two in the morning. The device was chirping and the sound was a sharp needle in the silence of the house. I stood on a chair and I felt the cold plastic and I realized the device did not care that I was tired. It was programmed to signal a low battery regardless of the hour or the state of the occupant.

It had one piece of advice and it dispensed that advice with a rhythmic insolence. The industry of content creation operates with that same mechanical indifference. It chirps the same instructions at two in the morning and two in the afternoon. It tells the woman with three subscribers to act like the man with thirty million. It tells the artist to behave like the media conglomerate. It universalizes the tactic and it ignores the harbor.

A girl sits in a room in a small town and she watches a founder of a massive channel speak. The founder is successful and his hair is perfect and his studio is worth more than her house. He tells her that the secret to growth is high-concept storytelling. He says she should spend four weeks on a single video.

He says she must ignore the old tricks and focus on the craft. She listens and she believes him because he has the numbers to prove his authority. She spends a month filming a documentary about the local river. She edits until her eyes are red and her back is stiff.

She uploads the video and she waits for the world to notice her craftsmanship. The video gets twelve views in three days. Nine of those views are from her own account. She is confused and she is heartbroken and she thinks she has failed the craft.

The Luxury of Discovery

The industry failed her. The founder gave her advice that was true for his situation but false for hers. He has a built-in audience of millions. If he uploads a video of a blank wall, fifty thousand people will watch it within the hour. The algorithm sees that momentum and it pushes the video to a hundred thousand more.

He has the luxury of ignoring the mechanics of discovery because he has already conquered them. The girl has no momentum. She has no social proof. For her, the high-concept documentary is a Great Eastern trying to dock in a shallow pond. She followed a blueprint for a skyscraper and she tried to build it on a swamp.

Aiden K.L. works as a groundskeeper at the old cemetery on the edge of town. He has spent thirty years moving earth and he has seen the patterns of the stone. He told me once that people always buy the most expensive granite for their headstones. They think the weight of the stone is a measure of their memory.

But Aiden knows the soil. He knows that some sections of the cemetery are heavy clay and some are loose sand. A massive granite slab in the sandy section will lean within a decade. It will sink and it will crack because it is too heavy for the ground it rests upon.

The salesman in the air-conditioned office sells the same stone to everyone. He does not ask about the soil. He does not care if the monument survives the winter. He only cares that the sale is made and the universal standard is maintained.

Quality is a Variable

The creator industry is an air-conditioned office. It tells everyone to “make better content” as if quality exists in a vacuum. Quality is a variable that depends on the viewer’s perception and that perception is filtered through social proof.

When a viewer see a video with ten million views, they assume it is good. They give the creator the benefit of their time. When a viewer sees a video with zero views, they assume it is a waste of their life. They do not stay long enough to see the craft. They do not stay to see the documentary about the river. They see the empty room and they leave.

This is a lie of omission. It is a tactic that works only when the stadium is already half full. For the person standing in an empty field, the advice is a phantom. They need a way to signal to the world that their gate is worth entering. They need a bridge between the zero and the first thousand.

She realized that the advice from the millionaires was a map for a different country. She looked at her channel and she saw the silence. She understood that she could not wait for the algorithm to find her in the dark. She needed to create her own light.

She decided to buy youtube views because she needed the numbers to match the effort she put into the documentary. She was not buying fame. She was buying the chance to be judged on her merit. She was leveling the ground so her granite would not sink.

When the next stranger clicked on her video, they did not see a zero. They saw a number that suggested other people had been there before. They stayed. They watched the river. They subscribed.

The Ghost of the Roman Roads

I have seen this error in every industry I have studied. In the early days of the railroad, the gauges were different everywhere. George Stephenson chose a width of four feet and eight and a half inches for his tracks. He chose it because it was the width of the ruts in the old Roman roads.

It was a context-specific decision based on the carts he had available. But the industry universalized it. They forced that specific width onto mountain ranges and deserts where a wider or narrower track would have been safer or faster. We are still riding on Roman ruts because someone decided that one situation should dictate all situations.

We treat the case study as a commandment. We look at the success of a viral star and we deconstruct their “strategy” as if it were a chemical formula. We ignore the timing. We ignore the specific cultural moment. We ignore the fact that they might have had a cousin who worked at a major tech firm or a friend with a massive Twitter following.

Frictionless Planes vs. Real Life

The 2 am smoke detector was still chirping in my mind as I wrote this. I thought about how much of our lives is spent responding to signals that do not fit our situation. We are told to wake up early by people who do not have children. We are told to invest in stocks by people who do not have debt.

We are told to be “consistent” by people who have teams of editors and assistants. Consistency is a different word when you have to do the dishes and walk the dog and work a job that drains the marrow from your bones. The industry treats your life as a frictionless plane. It assumes you have the same twenty-four hours as the man on the screen.

But the hours are not the same. The soil is not the same. The harbor is not the same. A tactic is only a tool and a tool is only useful if it fits the hand that holds it. If you are a new creator, you are in the business of survival. You are not in the business of high-concept branding.

You are in the business of building social proof. You are in the business of convincing a skeptical public that you are not a ghost. The big-player tactics are for the people who have already survived the winter. They are for the people who are worried about their legacy. You are worried about your pulse.

I stopped listening to the universalists because they were not speaking to me. They were speaking to a version of me that lived in a case study. They were speaking to the Great Eastern and I was a rowboat in a storm.

“People think the digging is the hard part. The hard part is the shoring. If you don’t shore up the sides, the hole will collapse before you can even get the casket in.”

– Aiden K.L., Cemetery Groundskeeper

The industry tells you to focus on the casket. They tell you to make it beautiful and lined with silk. But if you don’t shore up the hole, the beauty doesn’t matter. Social proof is the shoring. It is the invisible structure that keeps the work from being buried by the weight of the algorithm.

Building the Appearance of Success

We must reject the idea that there is one way to grow. We must embrace the specificity of our own struggle. If you are starting at zero, you do not need the advice of someone at ten million. You need the advice of the person who just got to a thousand.

You need to know how to bridge the gap. You need to know how to create the appearance of success until the reality of success catches up. This is not dishonesty. It is a response to a system that is biased toward the big and the established. It is a way of saying that the harbor must be deep enough for the ship.

The girl with the documentary is still making videos. She does not spend a month on each one anymore. She makes them faster and she ensures that each one has the social proof it needs to be taken seriously. She stopped trying to build a skyscraper on a swamp. She drained the swamp first. She put in the pilings.

She understood that her context was not the founder’s context. She understood that she was not a failure; she was just a builder who had been given the wrong blueprints. She looks at her view counts now and she does not feel the heart-throb of desperation.

She feels the steady pulse of a machine that is finally working because the parts actually fit the frame. The industry is still chirping in the middle of the night but she has learned to ignore the sound. She has her own ladder now and she knows exactly where the batteries go.