Celebrity is the New Oil

#category-of-one

Tuesday, July 18th, 2023

Mr Beast's massive audience and his projected wealth to be over $100B is creating competition and value around being a celebrity.

Being a celebrity always had its own allure, but I thought it was only for the ego-maniacal. Who would want all that attention?

Unfortunately, this kind of attention is essential for success perhaps in every walk of life.

Part of this is because most skills are commodities.

Part of it is those skills, even if they are not a commodity, create no value if no one knows you have them.

So how does one begin to cultivate this celebrity?

First is to cast off from one's own thinking that celebrity is the same as "fame" or "notoriety." Not useful. Probably psychotic if that's the sole driving intention.

Second, celebrity has a source. Usually it's extreme talent, which comes from Obsession is Essential. Unfortunately, calorie-free celebrity is super hard to pull off, and I don't think the mental anguish is worth it. This is super hard to identify, but it's probably the real skill.

Third, get into traffic. This means finding places where there's traffic, audience, community and apply this talent for free to others through providing advice that is helpful. The talent that's purely entertaining (music, comedy, dancing) probably can work in the America's Got Talent model of the world, as well.

Continuing to flesh this out from a professional or business context.

I have been thinking about content areas or skills where this can be immensely valuable:

Using more "product management" concepts, celebrity at minimum requires three things:

But what does it mean when we're talking about people?

Product can include:

Message can include:

Distribution:

The key part and I think the hard part is finding the distribution path where the party is exciting and lends itself to discovery.

This can also take work to figure out what is the approach one wants to take and has the best skill for.