The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, b... See more

July 2023

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise sh... See more

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they ... See more

Kevin’s ‘1,000 True Fans’ theory: In a world where you have direct audience contact, you only need 1,000 people paying you $100/year to make an honest living

The solopreneur evangelists tell us that these practicalities will eventually fall into place if you just do good work. The logic of a thousand true fans also supports this view. But the leaders in the passion economy show us that it takes a certain kind of creativity, a kind of transmutable enthusiasm across genres to make these projects work beyo... See more