SUCCESS

The benefits that accrue to someone who is the best in the world are orders of magnitude greater than the crumbs they save for the average, no matter how hard-working the average may be.

I’ve never met anyone – anyone – who needed to settle for being average. Best is a slot that’s available to everyone, somewhere.

People fly across the country to eat dinner in the restaurant they consider the best in the world. HR executives open up their budgets to meet the salary demands of employees they consider the best in the world. Voters wait in line to vote for a candidate who truly excites them, who they believe in – one who is the best in the world. Our culture celebrates superstars. We reward the product or the song or the organisation or the employee that is number one. The rewards are heavily skewed – so much so, that it’s typical for #1 to get ten times the benefit of #10, and a hundred times the benefit of #100.
Being the best in the world is a serious advantage when it’s time to think about marketing. If you’re the best in the world, in fact, marketing is almost an afterthought.

Welcome to the Short Head
If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, this isn’t news to you. But I don’t care about the long tail right now; I want to show you the short head – the short, big, profitable head. That’s the juicy share of the market that belongs to the people at the top of the list.
People don’t have a lot of time and don’t want to take a lot of risks. If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the navel, you’re not going to mess around by going to a lot of doctors. You’re going to head straight for the “top guy,” the person who’s ranked the best in the world. Why screw around if you get only one chance? When you visit a new town, are you the sort of person who wants to visit a typical restaurant or do you ask the concierge for the best place?
When you’re hiring someone for your team, do you ask your admin to give you the average résumé or do you ask them to screen out all but the very best qualified people? With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top. You’re not the only person who looks for the best choice. Everyone does. As a result, the rewards for being first are enormous. It’s not a linear scale. It’s not a matter of getting a little more after giving a little more. It’s a curve – and a steep one.

The (Real) Reason Number One Matters
The second reason there are such tremendous benefits to being number one is a little more subtle. Being at the top matters because there’s room at the top for only a few. Scarcity makes being at the top worth something. There are hundreds of brands of bottled water and they’re all mostly the same. So we don’t shop around for bottled water; there is no top for bottled water. Champagne is a different story though. Dom Pérignon is at or near the top so we pay extra for it. Where does the scarcity come from? It comes from the hurdles that the markets and our society set up. It comes from the fact that most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The system depends on it.

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