Is there something you’ve always wanted to do and make a living out of doing it? I have good news because whatever it is, there’s someone out there willing to pay you for it. That might seem like a crazy statement, why would anyone pay you to do anything? The answer is simple, most things are subjective, and people’s taste is very unpredictable. There’s always someone with the same or similar interests as you, and as long as you can find enough of those people, you can generate a decent income from doing whatever it is you wanted to do. However, this all assumes that you’ve devoted enough time to your craft that whatever you create has a minimum level of quality to be viewed as acceptable. Let’s do a little thought experiment and hopefully by the end you realize that your potential market is much larger than you realize.

Imagine you want to become a science fiction writer, and you wrote a short story called Star Voyage. You might be hesitant to share your work because you’re worried people might not appreciate your writing style. Let’s imagine the worst case scenario, you’re correct, and most (99 out of 100) people are not going to like Star Voyage. That would be pretty disheartening and might be cause for concern, it could even deter the most energetic individuals from sharing their work. That would be one way to look at it, but you could also choose to observe that at least 1 out of 100 people will like your writing style.

Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty.

This new viewpoint doesn’t sound much more promising from the first scenario where we described 99 out of 100 people would not like your writing. Stay with me a little longer, and I’ll show you where the magic happens. The U.S. has a population in the mid 300 million range, but for the sake of this experiment let’s just use an even 300 million people. If we take the positive spin on how many people would want to read Star Voyage (in this case 1 out of 100 or 1%), extrapolating to the whole U.S. population that leaves us with 3 million people who would be interested in your epic science fiction tale. You have 3 million customers out there that could be interested in Star Voyage. How could you not be successful when you have such a large potential customer base?

We can take this thought experiment further. Let’s assume I lied and that wasn’t the worst case scenario. Let’s assume that instead of 99 out of 100, you have 999 out of 1000 that have no interest in reading Star Voyage. Like I demonstrated earlier, it’s all in your approach and the difference between the glass being half empty or half full. We can be dismayed about how many people dislike our work, or we can notice the positive that 1 out of 1000 people are interested in what we have to say. Again, based on U.S. population size alone, you’re left with 300,000 people potentially wanting to read Star Voyage. In this second scenario, you have a much smaller potential customer base, yet, 300,000 is not a small number. If you had 300,000 pre-orders for your first book, there would be nothing stopping you from getting the book out. You probably wouldn’t be able to finish writing it fast enough. With this thought experiment, you can always restrict your audience more and more. For example, you could just as easily assume 9999 out of 10,000 (99.99%) wouldn’t be interested in your story. But what would be the point of extending it that much or even further? The real question is, do you have enough confidence in yourself that you will be able to convince 1 out of 1000 people to support your work? Even the movie Gili, highly regarded as one of the worst movies in hollywood history made a couple of dollars in the theatres. Assuming you have been working diligently on your craft and made a reasonable effort, what are the chances your vision is going to be at the bottom of the quality bell curve, pretty low. You actually have a good chance of becoming good enough to create something the average person would be interested in.

There’s a Whole World out There

I haven’t even gotten to the best part, in our previous examples, we only focused on the United States. However, language barriers notwithstanding, we have a whole planet of people that could potentially be interested in our book. Books can get translated to different languages and now the audience pool that you’re pulling from goes from 300 million to 7 billion. You instantly, in the worst case scenario go from 300,000 to 7 million potential readers of your book.

I’m not saying those people will be there on opening day, you’ll have to do the work to find them, and you have to put in the effort to get good enough at your craft to make sure you’re giving your best. But those people exist, and with those numbers, it becomes more convincing that if you put your best foot forward, you will be rewarded for the effort.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Now I’m challenging everyone out there that’s reading this. Get out there and write your books, start that podcast, record that video. There’s someone out there that wants to hear your voice.