Short answer is no. The longer answer is a little more complex than that. I do think if you're in a really small niche, then you can hit a ceiling where the only way to grow is to either try and exit that niche or wait for the ceiling that you've hit to get higher. That can be a little more frustrating, but if you are into something-- Let's just take-- you guys know I'm a cyclist, let's just take that.

Outside of pro cyclists, which I don't put in the influencer space, the biggest cycling influencer I know maybe has 200,000 followers. So if all you talked about was bikes, I think it would get hard to get above that number because there's just not that many people interested in looking at photos of bikes all the time. I do think eventually you could get beyond that 200, 300, 400 or 500K level, but you have to wait, again, for the ceiling to rise. You have to think about where are you in relation to where is the person who has the most following in the space that you're playing in.

Now, if you're not in a niche and you feel like you've hit a ceiling, I think that's more of a personal problem. Yes, I think that if we're being realistic, that there are individuals out there that would have a really hard time building a bigger following than they have. I would put myself in that category. If I said, "I'm quitting this job today and I want to have half a million followers in the next two years," I think I would really struggle to make that happen because of my level of talent, because of the kinds of things that I'm interested in, because of the person I am, because I'm fucking old and nobody cares.

These things would make it difficult for me to get a following, unless something else happened, i.e, I got famous for some other reason, God willing. So yes. I think it can be tough and I think that we've had this conversation before and it's one that you have to have with yourself of just, there are some people that it's not going to happen for. If you are like, "I want this to be my job and I want to be a beauty or fashion or travel influencer," there are some people it's not going to happen for. That is just the world.

You can say, "I want to be a photographer." It doesn't mean that you get to be a photographer. You can say, "I want to be a huge beauty YouTuber." It doesn't mean that that is actually going to happen. There is a huge amount of luck in it. There's a huge amount that has to do with timing. There's a huge amount to do with the situation in which you were born, and unfortunately, there are-- I think for a lot of people, there are ceilings that will be very hard to cross.

You need to ask yourself, "Is this a ceiling that is there because of something situational, because of the types of content I'm talking about, or societal pressures, or biases, or is that ceiling there because I am not as talented as the people that I am trying to outpace?" That is a difficult, but important conversation to have with yourself because I think you can still enjoy Instagram and not have a huge following, you can still get a benefit from it and not have a huge following, but nobody is owed a following because they post.

I think that there is this feeling sometimes that. "I'm doing everything right, I'm listening to this show, I'm listening to every podcast I can get my hands on, and I'm spending two hours a day interacting with people. I'm doing giveaways, and I've got a professional photographer, and I'm doing everything right, why isn't it working?" Sometimes it's the wrong time or you're not the right person. That's a shitty thing, but it doesn't mean that there's not going to be an opportunity around the bend. I think we are entering the twilight of Instagram, specifically, Instagram's hold over social media.

I think that their dominance at some point will be tested, and that new platform, whatever it might be, there will be a lot of opportunity there. The world also might change where it gets harder for everyone to build a following that large. Something that I've been thinking about recently of just like, "Is it going to get more and more fractured and our followings going to get more and more niche and smaller, especially as bigger influencers flood their feeds with sponsored posts and lose their authenticity?

"Are we going to see next something Navy or Kim Kardashian? Are we going to see a next version of that, or does it become much harder or impossible to grow to a certain level because there is so much supply out there of content?" There's only so much you can put out into the world. Again, if you look at other media industries, cable, magazines, newspapers, there's this period where there's huge growth in the amount of content that there is and then that industry eventually collapses on itself and eats itself and the strong survives.

The New York Times has-- I just saw Today's has the most subscribers they've had in 13 years. The strong survive. Wall Street Journal does well, The New York Times is doing well, Washington Post is doing well, The New Yorker is doing pretty well, I think Vogue is honestly still doing fairly well, but you lose the people that weren't at the top. That's why it's vitally important to, when you think about your life, think about the things that you are good at and make sure that you're dedicating your life based around things that you are better than most people in the world at.

Procter & Gamble will not stay in a market if they are not number one or two, and usually, obviously prefer to be number one. If they're in deodorant and their product is number three and they can't get to number two, they sell it and they exit, because for them it's not worth being number three, four, or five, six. They have been a pretty rare company that's been able to continue to be dominant for decades.

I think there's some pretty powerful lessons there, that if you don't think-- I think I talked about this in the Fohr Ground with Tim, is that if you don't think you can be the best in the world at something, I think that it will be pretty difficult for you to find the kind of transformative success that a lot of you are looking after. I just would encourage everyone to be honest, and if you feel like you're at a ceiling, try and ask yourself, "Is this a ceiling I think I can break or have I done everything I can out of this and I'm going to try something else?"

Again, I felt like when I was shooting that I hit a wall, and I was like, "This is as far as I can take it." I can shoot for 15 more years, and I will get marginally better, but I'll never be able to take it farther than this. So I'm going to say thank you. I'm going to Marie Kondo this entire industry and be like, "I have gotten joy from you and now I discard you."

I still do it for fun and I still enjoy it, I just didn't have to make it my job, and I was able to do something that ideally, hopefully, one day makes me quite a bit more successful than I would have been as a photographer. Embrace the unknown, understand and ask yourself what those ceilings are there for. That was a long one.