Zipfs Law

In the book "The Dip" Seth Godin talks about Zipfs Law. In my search for more on this I came across many typos of this as Zifs law, Ziffs law, etc... Anyway Harvard linguistic professor George Kingsley Zipf applied statistical and linguistic theories on human communication. He did all kinds of studys on word stuff... and rankings... But the biggest thing he showed the world was that it is important to be #1

Zipf's law states that in a tabulation of the occurrence of all words in a sufficiently comprehensive text, ranged by their frequency, will the product of rang number and frequency make up a constant. In addition will the number of different words in the vocabulary be equal to the frequency of the most common word (rank number 1).

So what does that mean? To be honest I dunno. Sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me but the one thing I do know is its good to be #1 for whatever you do. Often times I look at what I am doing with a project and ask myself the probability I can be #1. If the answer is absolutely no then its time to quit that project. Many times businesses get customers simply because they are regarded as #1. Do you hire the 2nd best person you interview for a job or the #1 ? With Nextpimp we were #1 for several years and loved it. Then we lost passion and got quickly overtaken by competitors. ShoeMoney.com is by far #1 as far as a blog that talks about making money from real experience. Sure that sounds cocky but its a fact. Am I lying? Advertisers always will go with #1 and they will pay more for the association with #1 The Elite Retreat is by far #1 for what it does. AuctionAds despite having 8 compeditors before launching including eBay themselves quickly became #1 for eBay display Ads within only a few short months before we sold the company. Do I always have #1's? No. In fact I would say 90% of the time I quit a project or cut it lose because we just do not have the resources to become #1. Is it possible for you to be #1 in what you do? If so are you willing to put in the time and work its going to take? If so the rewards are massive!