It’s over 9,000! My huge, meaningless success

I now have over 9,000 followers on LinkedIn. What does that mean? Not much.?

I got these followers through a stroke of luck. In 2008 I got a contract to create the video course "Drupal Essential Training" for a 40-person company named lynda.com. The company grew, was bought out, and rebranded as LinkedIn Learning. Since then I’ve made another two dozen courses.

Over a million people have watched my courses. And at the top of each one is an invitation to follow me on LinkedIn. So now I have over 9,000 followers.?

Basically, I won the lottery by hooking up with a growing company. Is that success?

Metrics seduce

It’s tempting to think so. Follower count is a metric -- a specific number. Anybody can compare one number against another, making metrics success for the simple-minded: A is bigger than B, so A is "more". Subscribers, views, customers, dollars... it's all the same.

In this case I had little to do with creating this metric. True, I kept creating courses. But there are millions of content creators who work harder and are (arguably) more deserving. I can’t claim it’s my own brilliance that led to those 9,000 followers: It’s mostly the efforts of hundreds of LinkedIn workers.

For proof, I present my YouTube channel which has under 100 subscribers. Yet I care a lot about the personal archiving project I started there last year. I’m proud of it. In my mind it’s a success, regardless of metrics.

How meaningless can metrics be? Well, you can buy social media followers from vending machines. There’s a whole industry around fake followers. Some cafes require you to like or follow them on social media to connect to their wifi, dishonestly boosting their numbers. And so on.

So what?

I’ve fallen into the metrics trap many times, basing my sense of self-worth on how many likes/dollars/whatever I have. And maybe this post is just a humblebrag – taking the opportunity to show how “successful” I am because of these 9,000 followers. (Which, again, were mostly earned through others’ efforts.)

Or maybe it’s just a self-justification for not hitting the numbers I envisioned for myself when I was younger, when I still believed that metrics were all-important. I’ve accepted that, in those eyes, I’m a failure. I think that acceptance is called maturity. (Or maybe that's just another self-justification....)

But I’m also reminding myself to keep an eye on metrics I actually care about. Hours of sleep per night; food in the fridge that I look forward to; improvements in my trombone playing; kilometers covered in rides through Holland’s beautiful polders and dunes.

I sit now in the public library. It’s quiet and I’m comfortable. My bike is downstairs. Later I’ll ride through to a community dinner. I’ll take the train home, have a healthy dinner, and maybe play the piano. These things are not countable, but to me they’re success.