20,000 People in a Room

One of my LinkedIn posts hit almost 20,000 impressions this week. Still climbing.

To give you context: I have 2,000 followers. This post reached 10x that. I kept trying to visualize 20,000 people — a packed auditorium? A festival crowd? No. It’s a stadium. The kind where you look up at the upper deck and think, “Holy shit, there are actual humans up there reading what I wrote on a Tuesday morning.”

Most of my posts don’t do this. Most sit at normal reach, maybe a few hundred views, some engagement from people I know.

This one broke through.

Not because I optimized it. Not because I reverse-engineered what would “perform.” I wrote it because I was genuinely fascinated by a conclusion I’d reached about coding with AI. So I just shared it — no strategy, no angle, just “here’s what I figured out.”

It happened to land in the middle of the AI conversation. That created tension. Some people disagreed. Some loved it. It was mine.

That last part matters more than the reach.

If you can’t enjoy being alone with your own thoughts, your content won’t be interesting to anyone else either.

The goal isn’t views. The goal is to work on things that genuinely interest you. If you enjoy the ideas you’re exploring, if you’d want to read what you’re writing even if no one else did — that’s when it works.

80% of your content will be for you. Normal reach. A few people who care. That’s fine. That’s most of it.

The other 20%? That’s when a stadium shows up.

You can’t predict which post will be the stadium moment. I didn’t know this one would hit 20k. I just knew I cared about the idea enough to write it down.

The only optimization that matters is this: would you want to read it yourself?

Because when the views come, they stop being numbers. They become real people. A stadium full of them. And the only way that feels right is if you meant what you said.

Write what makes you interesting to yourself. The stadium will show up when it’s supposed to.

P.S. Yeah, getting 10x the views is exciting — who am I kidding? It feels great. But I’m still going to keep writing about things I’m curious about. That’s what makes it worth doing.