Reflections on a big milestone

Over the weekend I broke the one million followers mark on Twitter.

Twitter is the only place where the anonymous demand accountability, entrepreneurs are mocked by the unemployed, jokes are the currency, sarcasm the religion and you make best friends for life you may never meet in person.

And it’s the greatest. I love all one million of you!

— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) January 20, 2018

I’m immensely grateful for the fact that people find my ideas and the things I share to be worth their time and attention. I’ll never take it for granted. And, I think, with this milestone, my responsibility to put out factual, helpful, consequential stuff grows to a greater degree.

When people come across my account for the first time and see 1 million followers, an assumption will be made that I’ve been vetted by the community, have mostly been an accurate account and have contributed more good than harm to the discussion these last nine years. I have to live up to that assumption every day, I think.

But I can still be funny. I have no plans to start acting like something I’m not, rest assured.

A few other things I want to mention about hitting this level…

1. I never paid for a promoted tweet or bought a follower in my life.
2. I never took any of the thousands of nasty comments directed at me personally, and never clapped back. You only fight back if you care what people think, and I don’t.
3. I never treated people better or worse because of how big an account they had. A good tweet is a good tweet, don’t care where it came from.
4. I never lost sight of the fact that people follow to be informed or entertained, and that it’s not about me.
5. I never thought of my participation on Twitter as expressly marketing. A lot of the stuff I do and I say is horrifying to traditional marketing consultants. “You can’t tweet that!” Yes I did. And I’ll do it again.

Cheers to the whole timeline. It’s been quite a pleasure sharing and learning from everyone.

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