The secret to success in the arts
felixsalmon.com
felixsalmon.com
The fact is that pretty much every successful novelist, every successful pop star, every successful artist is successful mainly because of luck. Oftentimes there’s skill involved too, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers as you do in the tiny set of people who make it huge.
There are a few things I find very wrong with this paragraph:
1) The definition of success. Even under the assumption of monetary gain, this just isn't a good statement. Success, for an artist can be measured in many other ways. That aside: plenty of successful actors got to where they were because they tried harder than others. They showed up to more auditions than others. They worked hard training themselves in schools or other avenues. They were simply better at the profession with a greater understanding of how to get hired. This brings me to my next point.
2) Just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers.
This statement is just not true. You will only find handfuls of people that are capable of pulling off, even basic, performances necessary for a professional venue. They are the exceptions and they are skilled and talented. They get work because of this uniqueness. They don't appear in shows over and over again because they are lucky, they appear because they present artistic, or even monetary, value to the production.
I appreciated and enjoyed reading the article but the definitive nature of the statements from the author regarding "pretty much every" successful artist didn't sit well with me.
For the reasons that the author illustrated earlier in the article, yes people do get lucky. But I don't think the conclusions are appropriate to apply to the skillsets of artists in this way.
Artists can, and do, achieve successes on their own accord without lady luck. Sure, luck is helpful but for every 1 successful Hollywood star, there are scores of other successful artists working because they are simply better and more talented. You may never see these people on the silver screen. They are successful; in their own minds, and the minds of artists. All of this without regard to an agreed upon definition of success.
I selected films for a mid-sized film festival in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I watched thousands of films, and in the end I still ended up getting desperate for great films by the end of it. A friend of mine selects for Sundance, and even there he says the same thing.
There's not a lot of great undiscovered talent out there. There may be a lot of undeveloped talent, but that's because the people who have it haven't put in the time to develop it. It's tough but true.
There is a huge variance in skill in all the creative professions.
I've had the opportunity to work with some extremely well-known actors. Within five minutes of starting working with them, it was obvious why they were so well-known - their skill at the craft was, to a man/woman, extraordinary.
That's something I've found to be the case in other contractors on films, too. Most of the time, in my experience, the 3D artists who get the top jobs or command the highest contracting fees are the most skilled and the easiest to work with, for example.
If you want a really good basic guide to success in the creative arts, I recommend Neil Gaiman's University of the Arts speech:
Highly suggest this speech for anyone; creative arts or otherwise.
What you're describing is a "3-sigma" difference, but to be an A-list Hollywood star you'd need to be in something like the 50th sigma. That just isn't explainable by skill.
There are a lot of startups that are profitable and have users loving their products that will never sell to Facebook for $1 billion. Using Salmon's argument, it takes pure luck to get to that Instagram-level of success. I buy that. I don't think it follows that all of those small profitable startups are therefore financial failures, which seems to be the conclusion he's drawn.
I'd agree, if you're intending to be an A-list star and won't settle for anything less, luck is going to have to play a pretty significant role. But there are a lot of jobs and opportunities for an actor, for example, outside the "best of the best" situation.
I was mostly replying in support of the comment above from randomdrake, however.
Hollywood actors are, at best, in the 3-4'th sigma.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day. That film ends up successful, and ends up catapulting them into the big leagues -- one, if skillful and motivated, can parlay that first success into the next because they were able to work with a great director, which increased their skill; and are able to acquire more time to dedicate to acting. Thus, for the next audition, the two people once distinguishable by a better performance on that particular day now have a skill gap as well.
That luck was involved does not mean that one doesn't need to have skill, or that one doesn't need to make the most of an opportunity; rather, luck means that a coin flip happened that allowed someone to make the most of that chance.
I'm sorry but I don't think this is true or a valid argument. If I may rephrase your assertion: are rich programmers better programmers because they have more resources to attend job interviews and can program more often? Whatever your craft may be, time (or money; same thing), doesn't necessarily mean anything about level of skill. Can it be a contributing factor? Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples on both sides of the coin to say one way or the other.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day.
It sounds, to me, like you're confusing luck for someone making a decision. Your assumption, that a director makes decisions on how the actor's hair looks that day, is extremely flawed. The truth is: there aren't 300 actors each coming in and doing everything the exact same, looking the exact same, and performing the exact same. Hell, there aren't even 2. Each one is an entire collection of skills, experience, head shots, and each one will deliver a different performance.
Professional and successful directors are, for the most part, incredibly skilled; masters of observation with uncanny abilities to find the right person for their vision.
Again, allow me to make the programmer analogy: if two programmers came in and wrote the exact same code, in the exact same amount of time, and produced the same output, on the same problem, where does that leave the decision? In the hands of the many other possibilities that the person hiring will take into consideration. Luck? No, it's someone making a decision.
Could that decision be based on whether their hair looked good in a certain light? Perhaps, but that would be absolutely silly for the person doing the hiring; they would gain nothing from it. They certainly wouldn't be a director working on a successful blockbuster movie if they really were making their decisions as haphazardly and with such flightiness as you assert they are. They will hire based on a multitude of reasons from, profitability, to talent, to personality, and all kinds of things in between.
I'm so much as saying they were two equally suitable choices, who both worked equally hard, but one happened to audition right after lunch. Regardless of the uncanny observation skills, we're still human and in the case of two great choices, even superficial differences such as the serotonin level of the director at the time of the first impression can matter.
However, the one who got the part, by nature of the increased experience, is now a better actor. This doesn't at all discount the hard work of the one who made it, but suggests that luck matters as well.
This doesn't discount those of us who work hard to create our own luck. As mentioned to another reply, you may have to roll yatzhee, but it is your hard work that gives you 1,000 roles instead of one.
All the bands (or 'projects' as we liked to call them) I've ever been in (more than 10 in the last 15 or so years) thought we could have made it; 'making it' meaning having monetary success or 'living off of music'. All of us failed except one of my ex-band members.
The problem is, as the author suggests, it's not really about skill, though there is a level of skill needed to be successful. That level is very low, though, whereas in other professions that skill level might mean a 30, 40 or 50k salary difference.
As a child, I thought playing music was about skill, so I learned classical guitar, and, according to my friends, I was the 'best guitar player they knew'. I always got compliments at shows and on my own albums. I was never even close to being found out by an A&R guy or signed to a record label. And guess what? There are a lot of people like me. 10 years ago I got really into jazz and that was my new circle or 'thing'. I came at music more from a jazz perspective because I knew theory and deconstructed tunes (in all styles) whereas rock musicians don't really like to do that and many of them can't. I remember going to the jazz festival and talking to musicians telling me how 'Yah, we're signed, but we don't even get a free copy of our album. We have to pay for it like everybody else'. These local musicians are successful because they live off their music, but many of them have modest earnings that pay the bills. They can't afford vacationing every year to somewhere fancy and most have beat-up cars, maybe a wife, and no more than one child, if that. They are very humble people.
(And yet, and yet) you have people that can hardly sing a note that are famous where their work is based on great post-production sound engineers. It's easy to be bitter about the music industry, but a lot of them aren't. I know I'm not and I listen to Justin Bieber without a problem (though my friends and family think it is very bizarre of me to).
The way you reach monetary/economic success as a musician is usually about non-music-related stuff you do, which is strange because in most professions, the way you become successful is by practicing your art and honing your skills.
My only friend (my ex-band mate) that is 'successful' tours the world and lives off music, but he barely breaks even, since they have to pay for studio costs, equipment costs, accommodation, car/transportation costs, roadies, etc. He loves it, but he says it is extremely difficult and gets depressed easily. This particular friend knows his limited skills so he goes more for showmanship and energy and getting people pumped - he plays garage rock. The funny (interesting) thing is his band was about to disband when all of a sudden the right A&R guy discovered them. It took probably 4 years of touring the country (Canada) and some parts of the States all on their own expense while having full-time jobs and doing it on their vacation time. Thousands of dollars. He was doing it while we were in a band together and with our band we burnt over 10k of our own money in only a year and a half.
Now when I hear him on the radio I love it. I'm so proud of him (and I can picture everyone laughing at me for being such a nerd). But there is a huge element of luck and he knows it. You work hard and don't expect to make it, yet you put yourself through it because you love your art, your music. And you do this for decades.
Seems like this is actually common to every profession where other people matter to your success... which is almost every profession. On HN, one usually hears this same idea framed as coding/design/product versus business/selling/marketing. I think people in most lines of work would agree that as long as you are not incompetent it is personal relationships, image, persuasion, and all of those 'soft' skills that that matter more to (financial) success than technical skill.
Really interesting post. Thanks.
To summarize the abstract:
"Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5762/854.short http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p...
It would be interesting to test this with Hacker News, showing different users two different sets of comment rankings. This would show how much top-rated comments get voted up because they are popular versus voted up because they are "better".
> "Carly Rae Jepsen has a catchy pop tune, but is only really successful because she happened to be in the right place at the right time."
No, publicity like this is practically never accidental. Every news article, blog post, radio station play, magazine mention, is highly deliberate and evidence of a good publicity and marketing crew at work.
Whenever the NYTimes writes about some new app, some new startup, or a new product, suffice it to say some marketing legwork has been done. This isn't to insinuate some kind of payola, but rather that "getting noticed" is 90% putting your product in front of important people - these leads are rarely ever organic.
To bring it back into our tech-world for a moment: do you really think that getting featured by Apple in an App Store "guide" is accidental? That it's strictly Apple deciding who makes the cut without external influence? Or is it a whole lot of interested parties pitching their product in the background?
So no, Carly Rae Jepsen wasn't "in the right place at the right time", she had a catchy pop tune, an incredibly well-executed music video with just enough shock/controversy to go viral, and incredible timing.
And luck. But let's not shovel everything under luck.
She EARNED that chance to be heard by Bieber. Luck doesn't and never does have anything to do with it. Luck doesn't exist. The word luck is just a way to discredit hard work and unseen efforts.
Think of it as a 6 sided dice roll. 3d6 simulates a bell curve of skill + 1d6 simulating luck, and you need 18 or more to "win." The top of the top talent will rise to the top with or without luck. Those without the drive or talent won't "win" even if they have the best luck.
But to ignore that luck exists? Talent and hard work are a pre-requesite, but everything from winning the genetic lottery (passport from an Industrialized country) to being attractive.
For another example... in 1999, a Canadian band called The Tea Party had a #1 single called "Heaven Coming down," and had a great run in Canada, but they never became the global sensation Nickelback did, despite having talent. (That is not to disparage Nickelback -- that band worked hard, and had talent. Why did one make it in America, and one only in Canada, and Europe/Australia to a lesser extent?)
King's X was rated one of the top 100 artists of hard rock by VH1. They toured their ass off, yet somehow never captured the attention that others expected them to get. Sometimes, it isn't all about talent and hard work.
Again: talent is a prerequesite. Luck does not cancel talent out by any means! Luck does not describe Bill Gates -- he likely would have been successful even if his parents weren't millionaires. However, we might all remember CP/M a little better if Mary Maxwell Gates isn't on the United Way board with John Opel.
Now, that doesn't mean Gates and Microsoft doesn't become massive in another way. However, that small bit of "luck" helped tilt IBM to trust a less known entity. ___
The way I look at luck is not like the lottery, but rather a dice roll. You may have to roll yahtzee, but if you give yourself a thousand chances, you're better off than the person who only gives themselves one chance, or resigns themselves to failure because they figure only someone lucky can roll yahtzee.
You still may have to be at the right place at the right time, but if you work hard to stick around the right place, the right time is significantly more likely.
It is luck. If you emphasize the preparation part (of 'where preparation meets opportunity' -Seneca).
Of the three developers I know who have been featured in the App Store (New & Noteworthy, not the main spotlight), Apple contacted them out of the blue. In one case, they asked one of them to change their App title so it was less spammy (it was). All of the apps were polished and worthy of the designation (and not games). We believe that App Store reviewers have a special queue to submit noteworthy apps that are then editorially reviewed. Really, as an upstream commenter noted about reviewing film festival submissions, there is a lot of mediocre apps - good ones stand out in the stream.
The fact that the apps were incredibly well-made didn't hurt.
And this underscores the whole point - success is a probability function, it is hardly ever guaranteed. The author seems to blow this out of proportion though, and suggests the common refrain that one should just give up/get out of the game. This ignores the innumerable things you can do to improve your own odds, that others aren't doing already.
A large part of that is to make sure that your product/skill is actually good. But that is incomplete.
Without giving away the secret sauce, does that company have a strong niche that they excel in? I am fascinated by competent marketing; one of the apps I mentioned, before their launch, basically pulled together anyone who had ever emailed them about their previous apps and sent a really gorgeous teaser email.
I also wonder if your app icons are in the top 1%.
The lucky part is impressing the right person at the right time that you can become a star. After that you still need to be set up with the right team, proper motivation and yes some talent. But the most important part of that equation is the right team, especially the marketing team. If you look at the music business, they usually try to sell you a rags to riches tale when it comes to their artists. They want you to believe that the person was found on the street, signed to a record deal, and now millions of people love them. Very rarely is that true. The music business has a formula and they try their best to stick with it.
You can see that happening right now with an artist named Azealia Banks. I use her as an example because she is in the middle of that process now. Not mainstream yet but on the cusp of it. Her label(Interscope) is pushing her as an independent artist that just happens to be getting some attention. They want you to believe that luck and her talent is why she is getting any attention at all. The truth is her marketing team is doing a tremendous job at getting her name out there. No luck at all. A well planned cosign by Kanye West, the use of Twitter to get into well publicized problems (beef) with other artist ala the 50 Cent strategy, Several big name magazine covers or articles before anyone knows who she is, a "just so happens" controversial Dazed and Confused magazine cover that is getting a lot of attention now, another cosign by fashion designer Alexander Wang, and all of this before she has even put an official album out.
None of that is luck or because of talent. When a label thinks it has a hot property then they step up the marketing gas. Gone are the days of putting gigantic posters up & magazine ads and catering to radio stations. Now the job of marketing is to fool the customer into thinking the artist popularity is all organic. The web is used to break the star, traditional forms of media is used to mass market them. So to the outsider it seems lucky but it really isn't. It is really the music business equivalent of SEO.
Lots of armchair handwaving here.
While I can not attribute my experience to be anything like an artist's, I find that at least for myself, my artistic endeavors are much more successful when I am open to types of creativity different from mine.
Working with other people and allowing their art to change my art, but at the same time holding onto the kernel that my art is about results in more opportunities to "catch that particularly important editor's eye" or to become more "lucky" so to speak.
He spent a lot of time pitching that "theory" (backing the least probable outcome) at economists at the likes of the ECB, BoE, the Fed, and so forth, and in the process pissing them all off very, very much.
Outliers are just that. Outliers. If, as an economist (or any other role that predicts anything), you went with a least-probable scenario you'd probably lose your job. So, instead, your recommendation is based on the most probable scenario. If you're thorough you might note outliers as a footnote.
[1] People who perpetuate and then capitalise on "bullshit baffles brains" annoy me.
[2] Predicting a one-in-a-billion probability that happens to come true is not a theory.
Taleb doesn't advocate backing low probability outcomes, because he can't predict which of them will occur any more than anyone else. That's a fundamental misreading of his approach. All he's saying is that some of those low probability events are going to happen, and you need to develop strategies that are survivable given low probability events. Strategies that assume no low probability events will (ever) happen are doomed.
The problem is, and he's very much aware of this, that strategies that are survivable against many low probability events are never optimal for the actual way events play out. The question then is what degree of non-optimisation (risk protection) are you willing to tolerate. A single trader might tolerate extreme risk for short periods of time. Too big to fail institutions should tolerate very low risks. Taleb is arguing for more realistic and practical ways to calculate and account for risks.
Take SAT scores for example. Are the top scorers just lucky? Luck may explain one’s 1500 relative to a 1490 or 1510, but luck doesn’t explain the difference between 1000 and 1500 except for maybe some extreme tail case. More importantly, the fact that SAT scores fit on a distribution does not in any way show us how they got in that distribution.
Whether fund managers and artists are lucky or not is not proven or disproven by this blog post.
Contrast that with the stock market where there is a much more significant luck component and compounded effects of winners taking all and losers getting pruned out year after year.