Being popular is nice, but not hard to achieve. Consider this story:
Brett Cohen was a 21-year-old senior at SUNY New Paltz in 2012, and like many college students he wanted to know what it would be like to be famous.
So Cohen got a few of his friends together in Times Square for a social experiment -- to see if he could get people in New York City to think he was a celebrity.
On a busy Friday night, Cohen had his friends act as his entourage. He asked a group of people to pretend to be paparazzi, and hired two big men on Craigslist to play his bodyguards. Dressed in tight jeans, an Italian button-down shirt, and big sunglasses, Cohen walked out of the NBC building in midtown Manhattan as though he just got off a late-night TV show.
And people went wild. Crowds of screaming fans began following Cohen around streets, into stores, asking to get selfies with him (video).
Cohen's friend, pretending to be a reporter, interviewed the people swept up in the mania. One claimed to know him from the first Spiderman movie. Another said he had a promising future in the movie business. And yet another claimed he was a popular singer, saying, "I heard his first single, it was good. I don't know the name of it, but I heard it on the radio."
"Popular" and "Important" don't necessarily mean the same thing.