Fame is a full-time job — Kelford Labs Daily

Okay, this post is a bit of a weird thought I’ve been having lately, so stay with me.

Lately, whenever I see someone post about their massive email subscriber numbers, their huge social media following, or their record number of website visits, I often have the same thought:

Why would you want that?

Because here’s the thing: Being famous is a full-time job.

Have you ever noticed how rarely famous people pass away? Or how rarely famous brands go bankrupt?

I mean, think about it: There are thousands of famous celebrities and brands out there, right now, and there are more made every day.

And yet we go most days without hearing about even one going away.

But that’s not to say famous people don’t die, or that big brands are immortal.

No, quite the opposite: It means that most people and brands stop being famous eventually.

It’s not that they don’t go away, it’s that they’re not famous anymore.

We stop noticing them. We stop paying attention. We stop caring.

So when they go, we don’t even know about it.

Because unless they can put the time, effort, and money into maintaining their fame forever, it just... fades away.

Watch a few behind-the-scenes YouTubes or TikToks of celebrities getting ready for events and you’ll see that it takes entire teams working all day, every day, just to maintain the celebrity’s fame.

And the same is true for companies. Yes, you can build a team of feral social media managers who can consistently drum up attention on Threads or TikTok—or spend a fortune in advertising to stay on people’s minds—but that’s a game you never get to stop.

And the returns diminish over time—the attention-grabbing activities have to get more extreme or more expensive just to stay relevant.

Which is a problem because fame and fortune are not directly connected. One does not imply the other.

Having a million followers doesn’t mean you will make a million dollars—but you might end up spending a fortune in time or money to build that following.

Having hundreds of thousands of subscribers doesn’t mean you have a profitable business—but you do have an intense, full-time job keeping your numbers up (and dealing with all the feedback emails).

So, what I encourage more than fame is profitable popularity—having enough people know who you are so you can make money doing what you love.

Because you don’t actually need everyone to know who you are just so that the right people do.

So instead of spending all our time or money trying to make ourselves or our businesses famous, we can focus on what matters:

Becoming known by the right people, at the right time, about the right things.

So we get noticed, not just numbers.

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