Not caring how many
Winning a battle is all about numbers unless you have other advantages. (The Battle of Valmy, Horace Vernet, 1826, found in The National Gallery)
It’s pretty hard not to care what people think.
For deep, evolutionary reasons, we humans associate rejection with death. No one wants to be abandoned by the tribe and left cold, hungry, and alone in the forest.
But caring how many people are paying attention — that’s a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors, living in small groups, probably wouldn’t have been able to conceptualize metrics like Amazon sales rankings, subscriber count, or ticket sales. You don’t need more zeros at the end of your number of associates in order to stay safe and alive (until agriculture comes along and you have territory to conquer or defend, that is).
I have tried to keep this in mind over the years, with varying levels of success. I learned early on that the number of students at Eclectic Music needed to be in the hundreds in order for me to break even, but the increased number of students affected only the bottom line. It didn’t change the way I felt about myself or my work. As enrollment increased and the community grew, I was not able to feel the greater impact that our school was making. I didn’t have any kind of emotional connection to that.
This is why I purposely kept The Little Middle School small. Why would I go to all of the hassle of making it bigger if it meant that I wasn’t going to be able to have personal relationships with all of the students and their parents? Of course, at that scale, I couldn’t make the financials work if I were not going to be personally involved. In the end, when I could no longer be personally involved, I chose to discontinue the program.
A couple of weeks before the it ended, though, I stood outside our building in the spring sunshine and recorded a brief video. A mini screen test.
In the video, I said, “It’s so much easier to start a thing if you don’t care how many people are going to pay attention to it.
“It’s hard not to care what people think, but I think it’s possible to not worry about how many.
“That makes it so much easier to keep showing up and keep trying things.”
Ironically, I didn’t publish this video, but this is the philosophy I was committed to when I started posting videos on TikTok a month later.
Also ironically, my following on that platform has grown beyond my wildest expectations — currently 6,750.
And now, even more ironically, it’s getting harder to not worry about how many. I am not used to this level of visibility. I’m not used to sharing my work with people I don’t know personally.
I was prepared to keep showing up and trying things when I figured my work was going to be obscure forever. That’s all I was thinking of when I said that in the video. The flip side didn’t occur to me. What does it mean to iterate and experiment when so many people are potentially watching?
At the moment, my decision is to just keep doing what I’m doing. Since I already know that I can’t actually feel the difference between 150 people and 300, maybe 6,750 (wait, make that 6,753) isn’t that different, either. I can figure this out.
My favorite artists and leaders are the ones who can somehow make a personal connection even at scale. It feels genuine from my perspective, but wonder how it feels from their perspective. Is it satisfying? Does it give them a sense of meaning? I’m curious.
I still think it’s possible to not care about how many people are tuned in. I’m discovering that it will require work — not so different from the work I had to do when I was receiving little acknowledgement. It’s keeping an eye on the ol’ ego, just as I once did when I got a handful of likes on an Instagram sunset.
Maybe there’s no way around the desire for approval that helps my primitive brain to know that I am firmly ensconced in my social group, safe from bears and wolves. But once that need is met, I can be free to take risks and explore. And maybe that’s what it means to be an artist and a leader. I’d like to dedicate myself to that in a deeper way.
