Emmett Rogers mapped how new ideas spread: innovators and early adopters make up about 16% of people, and reaching that threshold triggers a tipping point where the majority follows. Success isn't about predicting when it happens, just staying disciplined through the process.
Questions this video answers
2.5%
13.5%
16%
15–18% market penetration
"Emmett Rogers" (1960s)
Chapters
So all populations sift across the standard deviation. The whole, the old bell curve, right. If you have high performers in a population, you're going to have low performers. You can have an average always. Right. With the law of diffusion tells us that the first two and a half percent of any population are your innovators, is your big idea people. Right. Then the next about 13 and a half percent of your population are early adopters. These people are very comfortable spending extra money, time, energy, making some sort of sacrifice to be a part of something that's bigger than themselves, that reflects who they are. Then you have the majority, the early majority and the late majority. A little more cynical, a little more practical, you know, what's in it for me? Will I get my money back if it doesn't work? You know, will I get in trouble? You know, that kind of thing, you know, a little more risk averse. And then finally, the last 16%, you have your laggards. The only reason they do anything is because you basically don't have a choice anymore. Right. What the law of diffusion tells us is that if you want to have mass market success, if you want an idea to spread or be sticky.
You have to achieve between 15 and 18% market penetration. And then a social phenomenon happens called a tipping point. And it just goes. But because most of us want the majority, we aim all of our efforts at the majority, which actually doesn't work because the majority will not try something new until somebody else has tried it first. And so there's nothing that I'm doing that's mythical or magical. Right. There's social phenomena that I've written about, other people have written about. The law of diffusion is not my idea. It's Emmett Rogers from the 1960s. You know.
The only thing that I did like anything that works is I had the discipline to do it. That's right. You want to get into shape, you have to have the discipline to do it. You want to be healthy, you have to have the discipline to do it. And so. And you have to get comfortable that you cannot predict when success happens. You just have to believe that the process works and you stick to the process. That's all I did and everything that it is written about in that book. Yeah, that's literally the thing that I followed.
