Top 40,000,000 under 40

Every year, all sorts of organizations publish a list of upcoming leaders, called the Top 40 Under 40. Part of what makes it special is scarcity: it excludes everyone except 40 people. In Canada, where I live, there are just over 40 million people. 10 million of them are between 20 to 40 (let’s assume 0 to 19 years of age won’t qualify for the Top 40 Under 40). 100,000 are in the top 1%. That’s enough people to fill up a stadium. A lot of exceptional people didn’t make it into the Top 40 under 40. When you zoom out to the world, there are 4.9 billion people in this world under 40, which makes 1% 49 million people. Again, whatever dimension you want to use to filter for the top 1%, that is a lot of exceptional people who haven’t been honored yet. When the team at Basecamp chooses to skip the Fortune 500, and broaden their focus to serve the Fortune 5,000,000, they’re tapping into a similar dynamic. When you’re doing anything counter to the prevailing convention—in my case, reading and…