As far as successful careers go, Paul Thomas Anderson has one in the bag. He’s a respected filmmaker who’s directed academy-award winning movies. That’s the upper echelon of success as far as creatives go.

But when I heard him being called a “solid three-star guy” on a podcast, it made me think about what such success looks like.

Even with smash hits like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood (two very different movies), he’s ignored by a massive majority of people. Those people fit into one of two categories.

The first category includes the haters. These are the people that hate his movies and think he’s overrated. These are film buffs and armchair critics that think their ideas are better even though they’ll never act on them. These are the “talkers” that get pleasure from tearing down the “doers” because they’re too lazy watching movies to go out and make their own. They didn’t understand Punch-Drunk Love and found Inherent Vice confusing. We’ll get to why these people are irrelevant later.

The second group doesn’t even know he exists. Why? Because there’s simply too much other stuff to do. They’re distracted by other forms of entertainment. They like different movie genres. Maybe they only watch reruns of Bold & the Beautiful.

The point is, they have different preferences than the average PTA fan. They might potentially like his movies, but they haven’t seen them. They’re too preoccupied with whatever else they’re more interested in.

And that’s where “popularity” gets interesting to think about as a numbers game.

Derek Thompson, in his excellent book Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction, has an interesting point about popularity,

A simplistic definition of “popular” is the quality of being well-liked by most people. But the trouble with this definition is that there are few things that most people like. A book that sells one million copies in a year in the United States is a runaway bestseller — that 99 percent of the country didn’t buy. If ten million U.S. households watch a new show, it’s a smash hit — that 90 percent of households never saw. If fifty million people buy a ticket to see a film, it’s the year’s biggest blockbuster — which more than 80 percent of Americans over age thirteen ignored. Even the biggest hits in the world are typically missed by a majority of their universe.

Let that reality sink in for a second. No matter how successful you become as a musician, engineer, producer, songwriter etc, chances are everybody will ignore you.

Isn’t that liberating!

It means that most people’s opinions don’t matter because they’re not your fan. You’re safe to be creative without worrying about what the universe thinks. The universe doesn’t care to begin with.

And when you get people hating on your music it just means that you’ve become successful enough to earn it. So many people know and like you that the haters are going out of their way to tell you how horrible you are.

Isn’t it wonderful?

They’re wasting all this time becoming nobodies because of how great your work is! Spinning Parkinson’s Law on its head, you can argue that they are the 20% of the audience that contributes to 80% of the negativity. The remaining 80% think you’re great.

So when people say stuff like “you either love her or hate him” what they’re really saying is,

“This creative has done so much work that some people disliked it, even though the work has proven itself to be successful because here we are, talking about it.”

So give me a three-star career any day. It’s the sign of a solid string of successes with a few misplaced shots along the way.

So don't stress over every mix to make sure it's perfect. Just get it good enough and then get it out into the world and start creating your body of work.

And if you need help making your mixes sound professional enough to compete for the attention of the irrelevant haters out there, my Mixing With 5 Plug-ins course will help you out.