I’m a 10 percenter, na na nana na
Look on my works with awe (not in the John Wayne sense*)
I’m sure there will be lots of posting of stats as we approach the end of the year, especially as Medium makes it so easy by sending you a compendium of all the information worth sharing. Or not.
But as this is the first year I have been active on Medium — as opposed to lurking self-consciously in the background — it was gratifying to know that I was in the top 10% of readers and writers. Top 10%! I feel like I should be avoiding all sorts of taxes.
Next year I’m aiming for the top 1%. After all, that’s where the real quality of life resides. Right? I’ll be able to sneer at poor people and fund fake news factories and attack climate science. Sound fun, doesn’t it?
I started writing stories on June 1st. So that’s five months I missed this year. Where would another 150 stories or so have put me in the percentile stakes? Hard to tell based solely on the stats provided.
What’s likely to happen, of course, is that more people start writing on Medium. That will automatically devalue — strictly from a percentage point of view, you realise — anything I write, so it might work out that I could double my output and tread water. That sounds like not the sort of approach a true member of the 1% would contemplate.
I may take a more radical approach and simply do what I feel I want to do and give less than two hoots about stats.
That sounds much healthier.
Though fake news factory funding sounds fabulous fun. Even if only alliteratively.
* There’s a — probably — apocryphal story that when John Wayne was acting in The Greatest Story Ever Told, he was told to deliver the line “Truly, this was the son of god” with awe. He did: he said “Aw, truly this was the son of god”.
