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This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personall

This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]). The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working. Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for. Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule. [1] https://xtian.design/ https://xtian.design/

pixl97 2y ago
I mean advertising is advertising. You could have the best program in the world but if no one knows about it chances are you're not going to get rich. Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.
- tough 2y ago
  This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
- godelski 2y ago
  Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria. I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
- rf15 2y ago
  > you're not going to get rich which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.
- Mawr 2y ago
  Advertising is easy, making the best program is hard. If you have the best program already, solving the advertising problem is a non issue.
spondylosaurus 2y ago
There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... I feel like the "mid-tier creative who's famous on socials" phenomenon is similar, although I couldn't exactly say how.
- motorest 2y ago
  > There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
- dustincoates 2y ago
  I learned recently that Tony Robbins set out to be a motivational speaker in his teens. I was connected to someone on LinkedIn who listed himself as a "thought leader" one year into his career! How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt? But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.
jjmarr 2y ago
The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) came out in the same year my dad was born. But my parents still read it to me. I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
begueradj 2y ago
It's not hard work or talent that brings fame, recognition or promotion at any workplace of any industry.
- zombot 2y ago
  It happens, but it's rare.
  - guappa 2y ago
    Surely completely by mistake
motorest 2y ago
> People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working. It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion. If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them. In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.
zombot 2y ago
The majority has exceedingly bad taste, that's why mediocrity and bad taste always seem to win.
marklubi 2y ago
Make Something People Want. Have the poster framed on the wall in my office. It's part of the ethos I've lived my life by. Changed an industry, made a lot of money, and pretty much nobody knows who I am (which I'm completely fine with). Not looking for fame, don't want it.
LambdaComplex 2y ago
I like live music. I've seen plenty of famous bands play before. But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware). I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.
- hellotheretoday 2y ago
  Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month
  - ghaff 2y ago
    There’s an incredible amount of luck involved in making it big in the arts. Some of it is talent. Some of it is hard work. But a lot is luck. Almost certainly compared to professions where reasonable competence and work mostly guarantee a decent living.
    - Mawr 2y ago
      I want to believe that but I've never seen any compelling concrete examples. Got any music that's way better than its popularity/recognition would indicate?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        There are a number of singer/songwriters/folk who I’ve really liked who were pretty obscure like Heather Alexander, Kathy Mar, etc. may not be to your taste but I’ve liked and certainly not well known.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
At least in my personal experience, the combination of doing interesting things and talking about them in a somewhat public setting is something almost all really successful people do, and what few don't have a friend who is a hype man for them. While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not. Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.
criddell 2y ago
Maybe you have it backwards. The social media post isn't about the work, rather the work is the social media post. In that context, doing the work would refer to creating social media posts and the subject of those posts is secondary.
slightwinder 2y ago
> This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]). Attention comes mainly from understanding. And all people are in the mid to low-tier of understanding things outside their own specialization, and too often even within their own specialization. So to understand something great, you have to have enough insight into that area to see the greatness. And on the other side, there is also the false perception of thinking something is great, while you are just too low in your understanding, to see why it's just mid. Isn't this also basically what Dunning-Kruger-effect is about?
- hammock 2y ago
  Bell curve meme Neanderthal: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me" Midwit: "If I tweet enough I'll get well known and become great" Monk: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"
mclau157 2y ago
Honestly some of the best content I have been seeing is MIT application videos (both accepted and rejected), it is high school level but it leads to a lot of interesting discussions
kens 2y ago
The comments consistently describe the victory of self-promotion over real greatness. I had a strange thought: what if that applies to da Vinci too, and we don't know who the real greats of the Renaissance are. You might say, "What about the Mona Lisa?" It turns out that the Mona Lisa wasn't especially famous until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911.
nitwit005 2y ago
I don't see it as particularly social media related. That's just the cheapest way to get attention these days. I recall Benjamin Franklin famously pushing paper around town in a wheelbarrow to seem like a hard working young printer: > I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom He went out of his way to get positive attention, and it worked.

pixl97 2y ago

I mean advertising is advertising. You could have the best program in the world but if no one knows about it chances are you're not going to get rich. Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.

tough 2y ago
This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
godelski 2y ago
Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria. I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
rf15 2y ago
> you're not going to get rich which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.
Mawr 2y ago
Advertising is easy, making the best program is hard. If you have the best program already, solving the advertising problem is a non issue.

spondylosaurus 2y ago

There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... I feel like the "mid-tier creative who's famous on socials" phenomenon is similar, although I couldn't exactly say how.

motorest 2y ago
> There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
dustincoates 2y ago
I learned recently that Tony Robbins set out to be a motivational speaker in his teens. I was connected to someone on LinkedIn who listed himself as a "thought leader" one year into his career! How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt? But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.

jjmarr 2y ago

The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) came out in the same year my dad was born. But my parents still read it to me. I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".

begueradj 2y ago

It's not hard work or talent that brings fame, recognition or promotion at any workplace of any industry.

zombot 2y ago
It happens, but it's rare.
- guappa 2y ago
  Surely completely by mistake

motorest 2y ago

> People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working. It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion. If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them. In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.

zombot 2y ago

The majority has exceedingly bad taste, that's why mediocrity and bad taste always seem to win.

marklubi 2y ago

Make Something People Want. Have the poster framed on the wall in my office. It's part of the ethos I've lived my life by. Changed an industry, made a lot of money, and pretty much nobody knows who I am (which I'm completely fine with). Not looking for fame, don't want it.

LambdaComplex 2y ago

I like live music. I've seen plenty of famous bands play before. But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware). I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.

hellotheretoday 2y ago
Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month
- ghaff 2y ago
  There’s an incredible amount of luck involved in making it big in the arts. Some of it is talent. Some of it is hard work. But a lot is luck. Almost certainly compared to professions where reasonable competence and work mostly guarantee a decent living.
  - Mawr 2y ago
    I want to believe that but I've never seen any compelling concrete examples. Got any music that's way better than its popularity/recognition would indicate?
    - ghaff 2y ago
      There are a number of singer/songwriters/folk who I’ve really liked who were pretty obscure like Heather Alexander, Kathy Mar, etc. may not be to your taste but I’ve liked and certainly not well known.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

At least in my personal experience, the combination of doing interesting things and talking about them in a somewhat public setting is something almost all really successful people do, and what few don't have a friend who is a hype man for them. While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not. Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.

criddell 2y ago

Maybe you have it backwards. The social media post isn't about the work, rather the work is the social media post. In that context, doing the work would refer to creating social media posts and the subject of those posts is secondary.

slightwinder 2y ago

> This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]). Attention comes mainly from understanding. And all people are in the mid to low-tier of understanding things outside their own specialization, and too often even within their own specialization. So to understand something great, you have to have enough insight into that area to see the greatness. And on the other side, there is also the false perception of thinking something is great, while you are just too low in your understanding, to see why it's just mid. Isn't this also basically what Dunning-Kruger-effect is about?

hammock 2y ago
Bell curve meme Neanderthal: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me" Midwit: "If I tweet enough I'll get well known and become great" Monk: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"

mclau157 2y ago

Honestly some of the best content I have been seeing is MIT application videos (both accepted and rejected), it is high school level but it leads to a lot of interesting discussions

kens 2y ago

The comments consistently describe the victory of self-promotion over real greatness. I had a strange thought: what if that applies to da Vinci too, and we don't know who the real greats of the Renaissance are. You might say, "What about the Mona Lisa?" It turns out that the Mona Lisa wasn't especially famous until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911.

nitwit005 2y ago

I don't see it as particularly social media related. That's just the cheapest way to get attention these days. I recall Benjamin Franklin famously pushing paper around town in a wheelbarrow to seem like a hard working young printer: > I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom He went out of his way to get positive attention, and it worked.