If You Want to Build an Audience, Focus on Mastery Instead of Metrics

The paradox of Prioritizing mastery over Metrics is that it makes what you’ve created much more Scalable. If your product Sucks, no amount of "growth hacking" will cause it to go from lingering in obscurity to becoming a Unicorn. When you commit to mastery, you increase the likelihood of producing something with emotional resonance. If it has emotional resonance, it will continue to spread without hacks and tactics. If you focus on mastery, the Metrics will eventually move

Because we’ve quantified nearly every aspect of our lives and made it nearly effortless to capture a person’s attention with selfies, tweets, and status updates, people overvalue metrics and undervalue mastery.

Most people who have become masters of their craft did so long before social media ever existed and before they could quantify their value in artificial metrics:

Very few people commit to mastery because it requires playing the long game. It takes years of deep work and deliberate practice.

Why spend ten years becoming so good they can’t ignore you, when you can spend 20 seconds uploading a picture to Instagram or composing a tweet to be so average that they pay attention to you for a fraction of a second.

The paradox of prioritizing mastery over metrics is that it makes what you’ve created much more scalable. If your product (book, podcast, app, etc.) sucks, no amount of “growth hacking” will cause it to go from lingering in obscurity to becoming a unicorn.