Famous paintings, hit songs, and blockbusters that seem to float effortlessly on the cultural consciousness have a hidden genesis
The core seven impressionist painters were the only seven impressionists in Gustave Caillebotte’s bequest,
Subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer goods, songs, and human voices.
When it comes to looks, average is truly beautiful. Several studies using computer simulations have shown that blending many faces of the same gender creates a countenance more attractive than its individuals.
Omnipresent airplay is critical to make a hit. “Every bit of consumer research we’ve ever done shows only one consistent thing: Radio is the number one driver of sales and the biggest predictor of a song’s success,”
Every social media account, every blogger, every website, and every promiscuously shared video is essentially a radio station.
Above a certain level, catchiness doesn’t make a song a monster hit. Exposure does.
The GOP candidates with the most elite support, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, spent about $140 million on television ads through early 2016, but they both flamed out. The GOP candidate with the least elite support, Donald Trump, spent less than $20 million on advertising.
Less thinking leads to more liking.
People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible—“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable."
Neither measure of typicality nor novelty alone had much to do with most people’s preference; only taken together did they consistently predict the designs that people said they liked.
First, understand how people behave; second, build products that match their habits.
“The consumer is influenced in his choice of styling by two opposing factors: (a) attraction to the new and (b) resistance to the unfamiliar,” he wrote. “When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”
The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.
- Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do
- To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising
- People sometimes don’t know what they want until they already love it.
The construction of a pop song is something almost mathematical.
If you take a spoken phrase and repeat it at a common interval, the spoken words can evolve to sound like music.
A great musical hook is a great question with an answer that asks to repeat the question.
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all recorded music revenue.
The idea is to be repetitive up to the point where people might pull their hair out, and then change things subtly.
Always try to imagine the audience: Where are they coming from? What base of knowledge are they starting from? How do we both connect to where they are and lift them up a little bit?
The king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
People don’t remember songs for the verses. They remember songs for the chorus. If you want to make something memorable, you have to repeat it.
The key to catchy writing is simple. Just write in pairs
Was Star Wars the hit of the century because it was like nothing that had come before it? Or was it popular because, at its heart, it is the sum of a thousand stories?
What a story must do:
- A hero must inspire
- Hero must be relatable
- Have prepackaged suspense
The key to success: You take twenty-five things that are in any successful genre, and you reverse one of them
Readers “significantly preferred” spoiled stories over unspoiled stories
Vampirism accounted for every observable detail surrounding death. It explained why families got sick at the same time, why friends died after friends, and why the buried dead looked the way they looked. It’s not coincidence that, for many centuries, these myths stalked villages separated by tens of thousands of miles.
Broccoli evolved to produce a foul-tasting compound called goitrin so that animals wouldn’t eat it into extinction.
The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were 94 percent white and 77 percent male
old and young participants read several dubious assertions, such as, “Shark cartilage is good for arthritis.” But several days later, researchers checked back with their subjects and found that older adults were significantly more likely to say: Yes, shark cartilage really does help arthritis!
The mere repetition of a phrase or idea, even one labeled false, might confuse many people in the long run, because it is so easy to conflate familiarity with truth.
Emma and Madison, two of the most popular names of the last decade, weren’t in the top two hundred just thirty years ago.
Some people are drawn to things because they’re hits. Some people shun things because they’re hits.
The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.
prizewinners attract lower ratings because of a backlash among the book’s readers. “Consistent with work in the area of fads and fashion, we found that growth in audience size, or popularity, can itself be seen as distasteful or a reason to give a lower evaluation,”
all jokes are violations of norms or expectations that don’t threaten violence or emotional distress.
In 1995, six in ten U.S. adults said they had never heard of the Internet or weren’t sure what it was; five years later, half the country was online.
Teenagers arose because of the following condiitons:
- The rise of compulsory education
- The Postwar Economic Boom
- The invention of the car
Critics explaining why the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in history often don’t account for the fact that, for most of its history, it wasn’t.
I might see a massive out-of-nowhere success—like the indie film My Big Fat Greek Wedding or the Korean pop song “Gangnam Style”—and be tempted to explain the improbable event as if it were inevitable.
Life is one giant roulette wheel that only spins around once for each person.
The same product can become a smash hit or a dud in nearly equivalent circumstances. It’s just a matter of math, timing, and luck.
Success in Hollywood does not follow a normal distribution, with many films earning the box office average. Instead, movies follow a power law distribution, which means most of the winnings come from a tiny minority of films.
The vast majority of the news that people see on Twitter—around 95 percent—comes directly from its original source or from one degree of separation.
Viral diseases tend to spread slowly, steadily, across many generations of infection. But information cascades are the opposite: They tend to spread in short bursts and die quickly. The gospel of virality has convinced some marketers that the only way that things become popular these days is by buzz and viral spread. But these marketers vastly overestimate the reliable power of word of mouth.
If a book sells one million copies total, it is a historic bestseller. In the spring and summer of 2012, Random House was printing one million copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy every week. Now with more than 150 million sold copies, Fifty Shades of Grey is the bestselling book in the history of Random House.
For most so-called viral ideas or products to become massive hits, they almost always depend on several moments where they spread to many, many people from one source.
The smaller, densely connected audience beats the larger, diffuse group. People purchase and share all sorts of things because they want people to see that they have them.
Specificity and familiarity matter. Detail can make the difference between something that feels like it comes from experience (and meaningful) versus something general and passive.
It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.
First, people seek out others who are like them. Sociologists call this “sorting.” Second, individuals change to become more like the group around them. This is called “socializing.”
The most popular mobile apps in the world are various shades of self-expression.
A person can only be advertised so many times in the same format before they become cynical
Don’t ask, “Who is powerful?” Instead ask, “Who is vulnerable?”
One third of personal conversations to talk about themselves. Online, that number jumps to 80 percent. A person’s egoism quotient more than doubles when she opens a computer or lock screen.
Humans are prostalgic, enamored by little predictions. But the future is an anarchy that refuses to be governed by even the soundest forecasts.
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you’re wrong.
Many good seeds fail to flower in bad weather, and many would-be hits fail through no fault of their own.
When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.
Success is semichaotic. Most ideas fail, and ideally the few successes pay off enough to compensate for the failure.
After the U.S. government, the second-largest employer of anthropologists today in the United States isn’t Harvard University or UCLA. It’s Microsoft.
In the 1950s, the television went from living room curiosity to household ubiquity. Less than 1 percent of homes owned a television set in 1948. One decade later, 83 percent did, and they sat in front of it for more than five hours a day.
Sometimes, an upstart company will topple a legacy industry not with a superior product in the old market, but with an inferior product in a new market. The greatest threat to newspapers wasn’t better newspapers. It was bad television.
Nearly 90 percent of young people get news from social media.
Many readers hated clickbait stories, even though they often clicked on them.
Above all, a great story should be an invitation to think, not a substitute for thinking.
The biggest hits are often designed for a small, well-defined group of people. Star Wars was for children of a magical age—old enough to appreciate movies and young enough to love medieval histrionics in space without irony or embarrassment. Facebook was initially designed to appeal to the friends of Harvard undergrads, not to connect the whole world.
In 2015 and 2016, at least ten films grossed $100 million worldwide with more than 99 percent of its audience outside the United States.
So often, the difference between success and failures was the quality of the people surrounding the artist.
There is too much talent—and too little listening time—for each worthy artist, creator, or entrepreneur to claim a seat in the pantheon of stardom.
My grind and my time. That’s all anybody can hope to control. The rest is magic sprinkle dust.