Welcome to Hitzville. We live in a culture where it seems as though everyone wants to find a hit, buy a hit, share a hit, and most of all, make a hit.

But what exactly is a hit?

Hey, it's Ben Scota, and this is a special archived episode of a Kimbo.

A long time ago, a guy named George Zip decided to count all the words in a bunch of books.

Adam Alla, see which ones showed up the most often.

No surprise, the word the shows up the most, followed by of, and then, and probably could have guessed that.

What's really interesting, though, is that the most common word shows up twice as many times as the second most common word, and three times more than the third most common word, four times more than the fourth most common word.

In fact, the 135 words that show up the most frequently in a typical book account for half of all the words that are used.

This is called a power law curve, and I can't believe I'm using audio to describe it to you. It's in the show notes at a Kimbo.link, but it looks almost exactly as you would expect.

Like a steep ski hill with a really long runoff at the bottom.

That the ones at the top, the tip top, the hits, those are really high up.

And then it levels and levels and levels and levels out until all the way at the end, you've got words like zoometry and zootrop.

They don't even have to start with Z. They're just words that don't show up very much.

Well, it turns out that this power law curve is sort of universal.

If we take a look at bestselling books of which there are a million tries a year with people publishing a book, we see almost precisely the same curve.

And with movies and with TV shows and with items on the menu at a restaurant and work your way down the list.

We know what a hit looks like. A hit is something that shows up a lot more than anything else.

Two times, three times, four times more. It turns out that when your book is a number one bestseller, you hear from a lot more people than if it's number 10 on the bestseller list.

Because the number one book, according to ZIFSLA, will sell 10 times as many copies as the number 10 book. That's a huge distinction.

So to start to understand this, let's compare the Super Bowl with Thanksgiving and beer.

The Super Bowl is the most watched TV show in the country and has been for a long time.

Why is that? Well, it could be for one of three reasons. Either people who don't watch a lot of TV all come together to watch the Super Bowl at the same time. I think that's true.

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