This video tells you so much about human nature. The world rewards people who take risks, and to take a risk is to bet on what’s unpopular in the eyes of the crowd. Pioneers are lauded in retrospect but mocked in the moment. Big business opportunities are low status at the beginning. Startup studios like Y-Combinator were a strange concept when Paul Graham founded it in 2005, but he's now one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. People laughed when somebody bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin in 2010, but the people who bought and held their BTC have 1,000x’d their money. The trend I'm betting on is that we are still in the very early days of online writing. Most of the world thinks creators are still weird. The creator economy is still a bit cringe — and that's why it's worth betting on. I recently heard about a person who has a very successful podcast. Despite making a lot of money and having significant influence, they’re effectively banned from discussing their show at family gatherings. People still haven’t caught up to the extraordinary influence of various online writers: Bill Gurley was writing about marketplaces in the 90s, which led him to invest in Uber (one of the best startup investments of all time); Y-Combinator grew out of Paul Graham’s How to Start a Startup essay and I don’t think he’d be so successful without them. Other examples include Emily Weiss with Glossier, Alex Hormozi with Acquisition dot com, Mark Sisson with Primal Kitchen, and Nathan Barry with ConvertKit. Whenever you find such a disconnect between perception and reality, bet big. Beware of chasing prestige. It's no coincidence that the Latin word for prestige is praestigium, which translates to illusion or mirage. When you watch the video below, look at how strange the guy looks when he’s dancing alone at the beginning of the video, and compare it with how cool he must feel when he’s surrounded by hundreds of people.