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In February I spent time thinking about “hits”. Only a tiny fraction of films, out of hundreds released each year, generate blockbuster returns. Only a fraction of books, out of hundreds of thousands published each year, turn into bestsellers. And in the world of venture capital, where I spend most of my time, a very small percentage of startups generate returns in excess of 5 to 10 times the invested capital.
Creating “hits” is elusive and no matter what you read or hear, there will never be a guaranteed formula for success. Why? A passage from a book I read earlier this year hints at the answer:
“Formulas are useful when the underlying variables don’t change. For instance, the chemical formula for salt is a one-to-one ratio of sodium and chloride ions, whose elemental properties are fixed. But let’s say that you believe—as I do—that the fundamental variables of hits include familiarity, surprise, emotional resonance, and distribution strategy. These are not fixed variables. The property of familiarity, for example, changes every year. The sound of guitar-led rock ’n’ roll in the United States was considered weird in 1950, mainstream by 1960, and old-fashioned by 1970. In our desperate search for simplicity, people want success to work like a garage door opener, where a four-number code springs the lock. But culture is not a keypad, and people are not doors. Our codes are ever-changing in reaction to our environment. If you can imagine a keypad that gets bored of the overuse of certain numbers—or a garage that changes its code subtly to mimic the numbers from neighboring households—then you are beginning to think like the hit makers I spoke to in this book. I can’t offer a universal formula in these pages. But I can offer subtler and truer lessons about why we like what we like, and how culture works to give people a better chance at making something that moves others.” – Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular)
For a while now I’ve been trying to piece together my thinking on this, reflecting on how we can tilt outcomes to our favour in dynamic and complicated systems. Thompson’s book is a great place to start, especially if you’ve ever wondered how things become popular. That said, the book is also a fantastic reminder of a blunt fact: the pursuit of a universal formula for outsized success (especially in a probabilistic world) is a wild-goose chase. As Thompson rightly points out:
“There is no complete and perfect formula for building a popular product. If there were, everybody would know and follow it, and the world would be awash in similarly successful cultural products, which technically means nothing would be very successful.”
I highly recommend Thompson’s book and hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.