Maybe we need to take some inspiration from the unorthodox, the unreasonable ones. The people like James Rhodes wrenching themselves into a new form. The people described in the Apple ad: “Here’s to the crazy ones.” And that’s what I think is meant by the term, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Commit to doing great work, and invest your life force.
Lots of people have done it. They’ve given us these lessons along the way.
The benefit of doing.
George Bernard Shaw wrote, “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” Good advice from a Nobel Prize winner whose plays continue to be performed more than 100 years after having been written.
Comedian and author Ruby Wax wasn’t afraid of doing. She put together a comedy show called “Losing It,” which she started out performing for small audiences within mental institutions. Eventually she took it on the road and invited doctors to attend so they could help audience members who needed mental help.
Ruby Wax suffered from severe depression and wanted to better understand why. A doctor told her it’d be too difficult for her to understand, so Ms. Wax enrolled in Oxford University and got a master’s degree on the topic of neuroplasticity. It was this knowledge that she humorously credits with helping manage her life.
Get comfortable with discomfort.
No explanation needed.
Art for art’s sake.
Some people are overly focused on an end result. Vincent van Gogh painted over 800 paintings in his lifetime, and although he tried to sell, sell, sell … he only sold a single painting during his lifetime. His work was so underappreciated, that a painting van Gogh gave to a physician in lieu of payment, was used by the doctor to cover a hole in the roof of a chicken coop. Even the work of children typically makes it to exhibit on the refrigerator.
Borrow and steal.
John Cleese, the beloved British writer, comedian, and producer, encourages those involved in creative pursuits (each of us) to start out by imitating those you admire. Cleese says it’s how to best learn your craft and how to find your own unique voice.
Believe in yourself.
Despite his intense passion, van Gogh wrote forlornly to his brother, Theo, “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.”
Creative work doesn’t require great funding.
Artist Robert Rauschenberg lived in New York City on Fulton Street in 1953 and was obsessed with making art. Some days he lived on 15 to 25 cents a day. There was no money to buy art supplies, so Rauschenberg would walk the neighborhood streets searching for whatever trash he could utilize as art. One day, without money to buy a blank canvas, Rauschenberg found an old quilt that had been thrown out. He used it as a canvas and decided to utilize other materials. That led to his practice of combining a variety of found objects and materials into works he called “Combines,” and a new form of art evolved. “I wanted something other than what I could make myself
and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness
and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn’t
a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was.”
—Robert Rauschenberg
Creativity takes courage.
Artist Henri Matisse said exactly that: “Creativity takes courage.”
Persistence matters.
From what I can tell, most everyone who’s succeeded has overcome “failure.” Walt Disney was fired at 22 for not being creative enough, and one of his first ventures went bankrupt. Elon Musk invested his entire $200 million fortune and was on the edge of bankruptcy before SpaceX and Tesla Motors began to slowly get traction and turnaround. Henry Ford failed at the first three automotive companies he founded, before starting a fourth time with the Ford Motor Company.
Reinvent.
Creative people form themselves through the cauldron of passion and practice, and, once successful, they typically continue to reinvent out of bravery or lunacy or both.
Although Robert Rauschenberg lived for a time on 15 cents a day, eventually his work was critically recognized and his work was highly sought (and highly valued). Yet, in 1964, when Rauschenberg won an international award in Venice, he called his assistant in New York and said to destroy all of his silkscreens so that he wouldn’t repeat himself. Such was his commitment to continually search for new artistic frontiers. “To be an artist you have to give up everything,
including the desire to be a good artist.”
—Jasper Johns
Enjoy the journey.
It’s a Taoist saying. It’s a Chinese proverb. And Steve Jobs popularized the phrase in our time.
We’re here for the briefest of time. We’re each going from our own point A to point Z—with peaks and valleys, stops and starts—along the way.
Create. Be kind. Be courageous. Love. Enjoy. It’s what makes us human.
I love you.
Proven Strategies on How to Create a Hit
Here’s a short story about the possibilities of success or failure, and the factors and randomness that go into deciding the outcome.
Joanne is a young, single mom who writes her first book, and then finds an agent who agrees to try to help find a publisher. The book is sent to a publisher for review, and shortly thereafter rejected. This is repeated again and again by Joanne and her agent, each time the submission is met with a rejection. In fact, it’s repeated twelve times, before a publisher was found who agreed to publish the book—and only because the daughter of the company’s chairman liked the book.
Since the publication of her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the author Joanne Rowling, or J. K. Rowling as she is better known, and her books have gained immense popularity and become a cultural worldwide phenomenon, selling more than 500 million copies and being translated into over 80 languages (as of 2018). J. K. Rowling has subsequently become one of the richest women in the world. Yet the publication of her first book might well never have happened.
The road to creating a hit—whether a book, movie, product, or company—requires a significant amount of work and passion. History and recent research also show that creating a hit can be unpredictable and involve a good amount of luck. Yet there are a couple of simple proven strategies that individuals and companies can use that have been shown to have a profound effect on making a hit. In fact, one of the companies successfully using these strategies has created hit after hit after hit. They’ve released 20 major products over the past 23 years, and every one of the 20 have been blockbusters, each generating well over $100 million dollars. But more about that later.
To learn more about how to create a hit product, I met with Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at Wharton who has been recognized as one of the top 40 business professors under 40. Hosanagar has his doctoral degree in management science and information systems from Carnegie Mellon University; has received several teaching awards; has done work for Google, Nokia, American Express, Citi; and been involved with a number of tech startups. He’s a thoughtful and experienced teacher and entrepreneur. Here is what I learned from Kartik Hosanagar.
We are in the era of the hit.
You’re likely familiar with the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. As a quick reminder, it describes that approximately 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. A couple of examples are that approximately 80 percent of the mobile phones are produced by roughly 20 percent of the manufacturers; or that roughly 80 percent of a grocery store’s sales come from 20 percent of its customers. While there have always been companies, products, and people who received a disproportionate amount of success, we are now in an era where the disproportion is even greater—where having a successful hit brings more return than ever.
Graph from Prof. Kartik Hosanagar.
Hosanagar explained that the primary reason this is occurring is because of “scalability.
” He explained that scalability is the reason a movie star makes more money than a teacher—because the product of an actor’s work can be readily reproduced, delivered, and enjoyed by millions of people. And just as that winner-takes-all dynamic drives individual compensation scenarios, it also drives revenue concentration in various industries.
Subsequent to hearing Hosanagar’s research on the topic, and reading some of his work, the thought occurred to me that another key reason driving the “winner-take-all” era of the hit is “availability.” An offering needs to be both readily scalable (such as mass producing widgets) and readily available to tip the scales toward a hit-centric market.
Having people, products, or industries that are scalable and available not only drives a winner-takes-all market dynamic (or at least a winner-takes-a-greatly-disproportionate-amount), but it also means that small differences in quality translate into big differences in market share. As an example, 20 years ago you might have had the choice of driving to a bookstore in your town or to a slightly higher quality bookstore (whatever that means to you) 15 minutes farther away. In that scenario, you likely would just stop locally and save the time, but forgo the slightly better quality atmosphere of the distant store. However, if both bookstores were online, you’d use the online store that provides even a slightly higher quality level, because there is no longer any advantage to use the lower quality option.
This phenomenon can be seen in the graph below. Although any of the search engines would work, there’s no disadvantage in using the one with the highest quality, even if that is barely discernible.
Scalability can amplify the impact of small differences in quality.
There are two big problems in determining hits.
There is, however, a significant problem with scalability and availability translating into big differences in market share—market predictability becomes difficult. Unpredictability arises because small differences in quality can be difficult to discern and hence their impact on the market can be highly unpredictable.
Another factor driving unpredictability in markets that are scalable and available is that social media and other social influences will dramatically affect market receptivity and share.
What are the inherent qualities of a successful product?
This was cleverly studied by Matthew Salganik, a sociology professor at Princeton, who wanted to better understand how much of success could be attributed to the inherent qualities of the successful thing itself, and how much was just chance.
An example is the Mona Lisa. The painting is seen by throngs of people daily and kept behind bulletproof glass and guarded by a railing. The question Salganik and others asked is this: “Is the popularity of the painting due to its exquisite quality or some other factors?”
Salganik constructed a clever experiment where he created a website that contained 48 new songs by unheard of musical artists. He funneled 30,000 teenagers to the website to listen to the songs. After listening, they could download the songs they liked for free. Salganik created nine separate worlds each containing the 48 songs. In eight of the worlds, the teens could see which songs had been downloaded by their peers and how many times, so they knew which songs their peers thought were good. In one of the worlds, Salganik hid which songs had been downloaded, thereby removing any social influences. The 30,000 teenagers were then randomly assigned to each of the nine worlds, so they could listen and then download the songs they liked.
What was fascinating about the experiment is that different songs became significantly more popular in different worlds. As an example, in one world a song came in first, and in another world, it came in 40 out of 48 total songs. What the experiment showed is that history evolved differently in the different worlds and was influenced by initial social cues, which over time became magnified. Salganik went on to do other similar studies and found that quality does have a limited role, but after meeting a certain level of quality, whether or not it becomes a huge success is basically a matter of chance. A matter of who liked what and how those influences grew.
This randomness certainly seems to have been reflected in the thinking of William Goldman, the American novelist and screenwriter, when he said “Nobody knows anything … Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”
Defying the randomness.
So, if producing a hit is mostly a matter of scalability and availability, and if those two factors inherently make predicting a hit unpredictable, how can you improve your hit prediction? The answer lies in a couple of simple techniques.
But first, let me tell you about a company that has consistently generated hits. The company that was alluded to at the beginning of this chapter is Pixar Animation Studios. It has had 20 out of 20 hits for Walt Disney pictures. A typical year for any large movie studio has a few movies that do well, but the vast majority underperform and generate no profit for the studio.
Pixar however defies the odds. Kartik Hosanagar calculated that based on the odds of a 1 in 10 blockbuster success rate, having the first 14 Pixar movies all be hits in a row is actually 1 in a 100 trillion probability! And Pixar has continued to defy the odds. To date, in 2018, Pixar has made 20 major films and each has been a blockbuster.
So, how does Pixar do it? And how can you employ its practices in your organization.
Rule number 1. Iterative testing—fail early and often.
Typically, idea generation, whether for new products or services, is done by a small group of people within an organization—oftentimes this is marketing or product development. Pixar generates its ideas broadly and involves up to 500 different ideas, all boiled down into one sentence pitches. The ideas are mixed and matched and put through several iterations until they are winnowed down to the best concepts. As Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3 explains, “We fail a lot. We just don’t fail by the time the movie comes out.”
Rule number 2. Generate and leverage early momentum.
As Matt Salganik showed, social influence is critical in creating a hit product. Therefore, it’s critical for organizations to do whatever they can to lead and affect the social factors influencing their brands and/or product adoption through authentic engagement with their audiences and influencers.
Social engagement is best done when the spread of the offering is actually a viral part of the user experience, such as the following. When you receive a digital holiday card via email where your friend’s face is superimposed on the dancing elf, and you’re provided with a link that allows you to do the same thing to someone else (and spread the word).
Online eyeglass frame store Warby Parker (started by former Hosanagar students) that lets customers send photos of themselves trying on different eyeglass frames to their friends to solicit their opinions on what looks best (and spread the word).
Conference promotion where attendees receive a free book, thereby driving ranking up the New York Times bestseller list (and spread the word).
Creating valuable and low cost (or free) educational content to drive views and membership (Coursera, Udacity, etc).
Influencing the outcome.
Experience and observation have shown me that oftentimes there seems to be no reasonable or logical explanation for something that has become a hit. Sometimes it seems that popularity is in inverse proportion to its inherent value or quality. There are countless examples, and I’ll resist the temptation to start listing examples of things I think inane. But it does seem that for every product or artistic endeavor that was created as a direct result of commitment and obsession with quality—that deserves to be a hit—there is likely an inferior offering that is similar or even more popular.
Kartik Hosanagar and Matt Salganik have explained some of the reasoning as to why this occurs. More important, they’ve pointed out a couple of ways in which the randomness of creating a hit can be influenced.
So whether you’re working on the next big mobile a
pp, a Marty McFly hoverboard, the next great rock album release (yes, they’re still called albums), or developing a new medical device—remember you can significantly improve your odds of success by using the same strategies that helped Pixar deliver 20 hits in a row. Fail early and often, and generate and leverage early momentum. As Buzz Lightyear would say—“To infinity and beyond!”
Ten Things You Need
to Know About Work
Some years ago, I asked my friend, Stephen D. Chakwin Jr., to be a guest speaker at a “dine and learn” event for a company where I worked. Stephen is an attorney practicing in the greater New York area. He’s intelligent, reflective, and a lifelong learner.
That evening, he spoke earnestly to the group about work, ideas, and the importance of living a meaningful life. I’ve often thought about that evening, as it was one of those special occasions where everyone was genuinely engaged, the questions sincere, and the group discussion open and honest. There seemed to be a shared understanding among everyone present.
As it turns out, the other day I happened to come across my notes from that evening. The advice is as relevant as ever, and I only wish I’d referred back to the advice more frequently. I’m not sure what sources Stephen used to compile the list—though I suspect it was an accumulation of his experiences, readings, and connections. I’ll include a portion of the notes below.
No matter what anyone says, you are an independent contractor.
You need to market yourself inside and outside your organization.
If you can’t explain in 50 words or less why you are the best person in the world for the job that you are doing, you might not be doing it for long.
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