Success Quote by Joichi Ito

A little self-own, a little brand autopsy: Ito’s line captures the moment when an internet persona realizes it’s drifting from a voice into a product. “Edgy to broad and boring” isn’t just about tone; it’s about audience gravity. The sharper the writing, the more it repels casual readers and attracts the faithful. The broader it gets, the more it invites everyone - and starts to sound like it’s written for no one in particular.

The phrasing matters. “Definitely feel like” signals a gut-level diagnosis rather than a data-driven one, which is telling for a businessman: this is the intuition of someone who understands markets and also fears being managed by them. “My blog” suggests ownership and authorship, but the complaint implies the blog is now negotiating with external forces - readership expectations, professional consequences, maybe even investors and institutional visibility. “Going” frames the shift as a trajectory, almost inevitable, like entropy: once you’re successful, you start sanding down the edges that made you interesting.

In context, Ito comes out of the early-blog era when the web rewarded experimentation, candidness, and a slightly mischievous willingness to say the quiet part out loud. As your profile rises, the penalties for that candor rise with it. The subtext is the classic creator’s dilemma: authenticity is what builds attention, but attention is what pressures you into safety. The line lands because it’s a concise confession of that trade-off, delivered without self-pity and with just enough bluntness to prove he still has some edge left.