Not Everything Has to Be a Hit

One of the things I’ve been noticing this year is the pressure that every piece of work needs to be a hit. Online your post must go viral, the blog must outperform the last one. (If it doesn’t, something must be wrong. Usually the algorithm.)

But when you step back and look at the history of creative work, that expectation makes very little sense.

The Beatles wrote around 200 songs. Twenty reached number one in the United States. One of the most influential bands in modern music had a top-of-the-charts hit rate of about ten percent.

The Rolling Stones have written more than 400 songs. Eight reached number one.

Even in publishing, where consistency can look stronger, the pattern holds. John Grisham has written dozens of novels, many of them bestsellers. Yet only a handful have become enduring cultural landmarks.

Great creators don’t produce hits every time. They produce libraries and hits emerge from the body of work.

Social media distorts this reality because the numbers are visible and immediate. A post gets 103,000 views. Another gets 20,000. The instinct is to assume something went wrong.

But variance is normal. In fact, in most creative fields outcomes follow a power-law distribution: a few pieces perform far above the average, most land somewhere in the middle, and a few miss entirely.

Interestingly, the posts that stay with people are not always the ones that spike.

The ones people mention months or years later are often simpler pieces. Maybe a gentle observation or a line that gave language to something they were already feeling.

And those are different metrics.

• The platform measures reach.

• Humans measure meaning.

So perhaps the goal isn’t to make every piece a hit. The goal is to keep showing up, refining the craft, and building a body of work. Over time, a few of those pieces will travel further than the rest.

And that’s enough.