7 ms·

The secret to success in the arts

49 points by smokel 14y ago

tagawa 14y ago
tl;dr: Be lucky
Spearchucker 14y ago
I'm amazed every time I read/hear Nassim Taleb being quoted [1]. His black swan (outlier) "theory" [2] made some people rich, and it gained him fame. 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.
- simonh 14y ago
  The outlier theory didn't 'make' anyone rich, it just explains why some outliers got rich and why other outlier events lead to the crash. 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.
randomdrake 14y ago
Before adopting programming as my job and passion, I was a professional actor and I plan on continuing to act professionally when I move back to to a place where it is more avaialble. Working professionally in many capacities for many years, I can tell you that luck certainly helps, for some people. This author completely discounts artists who trained, worked and pushed themselves for years and years to get where they are: regularly hired for awesome roles, being paid well, and doing it professionally day after day for their livelihood. 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.
- 14y ago
loso 14y ago
This article lack of detail derails the point that it is trying to make. Yes, there are millions of people who try to enter certain creative fields at any one time but a very small percentage truly have what it takes to enter the business. And when I say have what it takes, only a small percentage of that is talent. Talent is important but it is only the first step. 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.
potatolicious 14y ago
Luck is certainly a big part of success - but IMO the author has misclassified a lot of skillful execution as luck, and that's a shame. > "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.
- ebiester 14y ago
  She's actually an excellent example. She is a Canadian performer who placed third on a season of Canadian Idol, and it happened that Justin Bieber was listening to the radio, heard "Call Me Maybe," and tweeted about it. Perhaps the song would have spread later on its own, but Canadians can probably point to five or six other well-played pop songs that never really crossed the border.
  - autophil 14y ago
    But how many times did Carly practice and rehearse and sing that song in public before that happened? Dozens? Hundreds? And just to make it on the show Canadian Idol and get that exposure - was that luck? Or did it take a lot of courage and gut churning effort? 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.
K_REY_C 14y ago
Patton Oswalt’s recent comments concerning "luck" are worth adding to the discussion. Talent may be worth more now than ever before. We've heard this before, but it certainly seems to be true: "Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no gates. They’re gone." -- http://thecomicscomic.com/2012/07/27/patton-oswalts-letters-to-both-sides-his-keynote-address-at-montreals-just-for-laughs-2012/#.UBQY0Apz6og.twitter http://thecomicscomic.com/2012/07/27/patton-oswalts-letters-...
wtvanhest 14y ago
EVERYTHING can be put in a distribution. Showing that something is X standard deviations away from the mean does not explain at all how they got there. 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.
- mertd 14y ago
  But SAT outcome for individuals is deterministic by design. If there was any significant luck component, it wouldn't be a good measure in the first place. Yet you can't deny the possibility that some fool could score 1500+ by merely circling the correct sequence of bubbles without having much skill. Furthermore winner doesn't take all in SATs. They just go to some college and that's the end of it. 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.
  - wtvanhest 14y ago
    Your statement, while widely believed has not been proven or disproven by the fact that people's success can be shown on a distribution. 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.
- debacle 14y ago
  When you're dealing with professional artists, or professionals in any sense, it's the difference between a 1490 and a 1510 that is what is fundamentally unquantifiable.
kens 14y ago
To make this quantitative, there are some interesting studies that show the popularity of music depends largely on luck. Researchers built a music sharing site that showed the popularity of different downloads and found not surprisingly that people downloaded the popular songs more. The interesting part is they randomly showed different users different popularity rankings. The songs that became popular with one set of users weren't very correlated with the songs that became popular with another set of users - basically once a song randomly gets more popular, positive feedback sets in. 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.sciencemag.org/content/311/5762/854.short http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.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".
barkingcat 14y ago
I think this article suffers from a lack of understanding of what exactly artists do, and how they become successful. From several of the excellent replies, luck does have something to do with it, but just because the OP doesn't understand the skill put into getting a gig or putting on a successful spoken word performance piece, for example, doesn't mean that an artist is just "lucky" to be successful. Lots of armchair handwaving here.
- barkingcat 14y ago
  There is also another factor: allowing yourself to be lucky. 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.
_lj 14y ago
Most of the discussion here is focused on skill vs luck. Those are far from the only two variables is success, however. There's Networking, the ability to sell yourself and the ability to target a specific niche (which in art, means not being too different, but not being exactly the same as everybody else, either). These factors influence success more than skill and luck combined.

49 points by smokel 14y ago

tl;dr: Be lucky

I'm amazed every time I read/hear Nassim Taleb being quoted [1]. His black swan (outlier) "theory" [2] made some people rich, and it gained him fame. 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.

simonh 14y ago
The outlier theory didn't 'make' anyone rich, it just explains why some outliers got rich and why other outlier events lead to the crash. 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.

randomdrake 14y ago

Before adopting programming as my job and passion, I was a professional actor and I plan on continuing to act professionally when I move back to to a place where it is more avaialble. Working professionally in many capacities for many years, I can tell you that luck certainly helps, for some people. This author completely discounts artists who trained, worked and pushed themselves for years and years to get where they are: regularly hired for awesome roles, being paid well, and doing it professionally day after day for their livelihood. 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.

14y ago

loso 14y ago

This article lack of detail derails the point that it is trying to make. Yes, there are millions of people who try to enter certain creative fields at any one time but a very small percentage truly have what it takes to enter the business. And when I say have what it takes, only a small percentage of that is talent. Talent is important but it is only the first step. 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.

potatolicious 14y ago

Luck is certainly a big part of success - but IMO the author has misclassified a lot of skillful execution as luck, and that's a shame. > "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.

ebiester 14y ago
She's actually an excellent example. She is a Canadian performer who placed third on a season of Canadian Idol, and it happened that Justin Bieber was listening to the radio, heard "Call Me Maybe," and tweeted about it. Perhaps the song would have spread later on its own, but Canadians can probably point to five or six other well-played pop songs that never really crossed the border.
- autophil 14y ago
  But how many times did Carly practice and rehearse and sing that song in public before that happened? Dozens? Hundreds? And just to make it on the show Canadian Idol and get that exposure - was that luck? Or did it take a lot of courage and gut churning effort? 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.

K_REY_C 14y ago

Patton Oswalt’s recent comments concerning "luck" are worth adding to the discussion. Talent may be worth more now than ever before. We've heard this before, but it certainly seems to be true: "Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no gates. They’re gone." -- http://thecomicscomic.com/2012/07/27/patton-oswalts-letters-to-both-sides-his-keynote-address-at-montreals-just-for-laughs-2012/#.UBQY0Apz6og.twitter http://thecomicscomic.com/2012/07/27/patton-oswalts-letters-...

wtvanhest 14y ago

EVERYTHING can be put in a distribution. Showing that something is X standard deviations away from the mean does not explain at all how they got there. 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.

mertd 14y ago
But SAT outcome for individuals is deterministic by design. If there was any significant luck component, it wouldn't be a good measure in the first place. Yet you can't deny the possibility that some fool could score 1500+ by merely circling the correct sequence of bubbles without having much skill. Furthermore winner doesn't take all in SATs. They just go to some college and that's the end of it. 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.
- wtvanhest 14y ago
  Your statement, while widely believed has not been proven or disproven by the fact that people's success can be shown on a distribution. 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.
debacle 14y ago
When you're dealing with professional artists, or professionals in any sense, it's the difference between a 1490 and a 1510 that is what is fundamentally unquantifiable.

kens 14y ago

To make this quantitative, there are some interesting studies that show the popularity of music depends largely on luck. Researchers built a music sharing site that showed the popularity of different downloads and found not surprisingly that people downloaded the popular songs more. The interesting part is they randomly showed different users different popularity rankings. The songs that became popular with one set of users weren't very correlated with the songs that became popular with another set of users - basically once a song randomly gets more popular, positive feedback sets in. 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.sciencemag.org/content/311/5762/854.short http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts08.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.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".

barkingcat 14y ago

I think this article suffers from a lack of understanding of what exactly artists do, and how they become successful. From several of the excellent replies, luck does have something to do with it, but just because the OP doesn't understand the skill put into getting a gig or putting on a successful spoken word performance piece, for example, doesn't mean that an artist is just "lucky" to be successful. Lots of armchair handwaving here.

barkingcat 14y ago
There is also another factor: allowing yourself to be lucky. 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.

_lj 14y ago

Most of the discussion here is focused on skill vs luck. Those are far from the only two variables is success, however. There's Networking, the ability to sell yourself and the ability to target a specific niche (which in art, means not being too different, but not being exactly the same as everybody else, either). These factors influence success more than skill and luck combined.