Hidden Brain - Success 2.0: Getting to the Top and Staying There

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

There are plenty of talented people in the world. So why do only a tiny percentage of us reach the highest peaks of achievement? This week, we conclude our "Success 2.0" series by talking with researcher Justin Berg about whether there's a secret recipe for finding — and sustaining — success.  Make sure to listen to the rest of our Success 2.0 episodes: Taking the Leap, Getting What You Want, The Obstacles You Don't See, and The Psychology of Self Doubt. And if you like Hidden Brain and want more of it, please join our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain+!   

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the late 16th century, a playwright named Thomas Kidd wrote a tragedy. It was about an aristocrat who seeks revenge after his son is murdered. Murder! Murder! Help her on the move! Come, stop her mouth! Away with her. The play was called the Spanish tragedy, and it is still produced occasionally today.

What outcries plucked me from my naked bed, and chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear, which never danger yet could not before. Thomas Kitt's play was popular in its day, but unless you're an Elizabethan scholar, you probably haven't heard of the playwright. You may have heard about one of his contemporaries though. William Shakespeare. As Thomas Kitt's Curia flatlined after the Spanish tragedy, Shakespeare wrote masterpiece after masterpiece. I knew him, I knew him, I knew him. Followed by comedies, Reason and love keep little company together nowadays. Followed by historical dramas and more.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove. Shakespeare's plays have been translated into dozens of languages. They continue to be performed four hundred years after he wrote them. Even more than that, his words have become so much a part of our lives that we all quote him without realizing it. Love is blind comes from Shakespeare, so does faint-hearted and sea-change and too much of a good thing. When you say all that glitters is in gold or this method in his madness. You're quoting Shakespeare.

What explains the gulf between Thomas Kidd's one-hit wonder playwriting career and William Shakespeare's sustained success? And what explains the similar chasms we see between performers in many domains today? In art, and in in sports and in music. What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare? Or Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan? Or Taylor Swift? Taylor Swift. This week on Hidden Brain, we wrap up our series Success 2.0 with new research that aims to unpack a mystery. What's the secret to repeated and enduring success? In a number of fields of human performance, success is distributed very unevenly. Mathematicians call these power law distributions.

If you look at all the accomplishments in a given field, Emmy awards, Super Bowl Championships, hit plays, a handful of superstars account for a disproportionate share of the spoils. The rest of us are lucky to even have fleeting success. Most writers, for example, never get their books published. Of the ones that do, a small number become bestsellers. And among the writers who produce bestsellers, a very tiny fraction go on to produce lots and lots of bestsellers. Most basketball players never end up in the NBA. But of those who do, a small number become stars.

And a very tiny fraction of those become household names. Well, you might say, I know why Shakespeare and Taylor Swift are so popular. They're really talented, or they were really lucky. But the chasm between total obscurity and being a one-hit wonder, and the chasm between being a one-hit wonder, and the cousin between being a one-hit wonder and those who have sustained success is so great that luck and talent seem like incomplete explanations. Across many domains, from entertainment to sports to technology, there are performers, creators and innovators who seem to have an instinct for greatness.

What can we learn from them? Today, we'll explore the psychology of creativity and success by examining the stories of two filmmakers whose work you know. Their story begins some 50 years ago. In the summer of 1977, a quirky sci-fi film became a global phenomenon. Star Wars was a story about an intergalactic civil war. It was packed with lots of drama and even more action. I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you. I'm here to rescue you. I've got your R2 unit. I'm here with Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi, where is it? Come on. There were aliens, spaceships, lightsabers.

And of course, there was the Force, a mysterious energy that bound the universe. The Force will be with you, always. The movie earned over 400 million dollars. Its writer, director and proprietor George Lucas was a graduate of the film school at the University of Southern California. After his massive success he began planning the sequel to Star Wars, the movie was titled The Empire Strikes Back. George Lucas wanted to build an entire franchise around Star Wars, but he didn't want to direct the sequel himself. He set his heart on an alternate director, a professor at USC who had made an impression

on him in film school. There was just one problem. The professor wasn't a star was fan. In fact, Irvin Kirschner thought George Lucas was out of his mind. He had formed this impression before the original movie was released when he sat in on a viewing. In an interview with Hollywood's master storytellers, Irvin Kirschner described seeing George Lucas's creation for the very first time.

We thought this is terrible. This is dreadful. What's he doing? He's crazy. It's a comic book. People jumping around, hanging around these odd creatures. What's he? God's going to lose a shirt in this. Fox is financing this piece of junk. Oh, we were sick for George, sick. Of course, Irvin Kirshner was wrong. The movie was a hit. But when George Lucas asked him to direct the Empire Strikes Back, he said no. In time, however, he gave in. In May 1980, the sequel was released. It is your destiny.

Join me and together we can rule the galaxy's father and son. Like Star Wars, it became a smashing success. It was the highest-grossing film in 1980 and earned over $400 million worldwide. Together, Irvin Kirschner and George Lucas made what some argue is the greatest film in the Star Wars franchise. You could say that 1980 was the year of Star Wars, but that same year, another film made its way into theaters. You want the solution to inflation? High friends, Marshall Lucky here for New Deal use cars where we're battling inflation. Use cars was a low-brow comedy that followed the story of a sleazy car salesman who had dreams of getting into politics. It was packed with ranch and gallows humour.

I watched Uscars recently. It feels like three movies packed into one. A manic energy runs through the film and the story flies off in different directions. The characters are highly driven, but also unpleasant. I found myself rooting against all of them. Used cars was not a good movie. To put it less kindly, it was a flop. The movie critic Roger Ebert gave the movie two out of four stars. He said there were too many plot lines, too many characters, it didn't make sense. Critics slammed the movie's writer and director, a young filmmaker named Robert Zamekis. He was a graduate of the USC Film School too, but while urban Kushner's career choices

were careful and meticulous, Robert Zemeckis liked to push the envelope. Before used cars, he directed a musical called I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Said in 1964, it told the story of a group of teenagers who were determined to meet the Beatles. Around the same time, he corrod a movie called 1941, a comedy about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. The most explosive comedy spectacular ever filled, 1941. FAN AROZAKEN! As you might guess, a funny story about the Japanese attack on the United States didn't go down well with American audiences.

It flopped too. While Robert Zemeckis' career was struggling, Irwin Kushner released another hit, never say never again. It was another sequel. This time in the hugely popular James Bond franchise. The movie was a commercial success, grossing $160 million at the box office. Both the directors in our story by this point had established reputations in Hollywood. Irvin Kushner had become the king of sequels, a director with a magic touch.

Robert Zamekis looked like a dilatant. His movies, like his stories, were weird, edgy and all over the place. You could say he had a magic touch too, for coming up with flops. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the mid 1980s, two filmmakers in Hollywood got famous for different reasons. Irvin Kushner was an established director who made the Empire Strikes Back and never say never again, huge commercial successes. Robert Zamekis was developing a different

kind of reputation. After a string of failures, he struggled to find work in Hollywood. Along with his writing partner, Bob Gale, he took some time off to regroup. One night, while visiting his parents in St. Louis, Bob Gale was flipping through his father's high school yearbook. He had a thought, what would it be like to meet the younger version of his parents? It was a weird idea, so of course, Robert Zamekis loved it. For months, the pair began writing a family time travel movie. They excitedly took the story to nearly every studio in town, but the stench of past flops preceded them. The script was rejected over and over by every major studio, some 40 times and all.

Robert Zemeckis later described what happened. I think the decision to not make the film was based on the fact that as a director I had a very poor track record at the box office. The problem wasn't just the filmmakers' reputation. The studios gave the filmmakers a long list of reasons their idea wouldn't work. Time travel movies don't make money. The story was too boring. There wasn't enough sex. Disney took a look at it and said they didn't like it because it was too raunchy.

Everything about the movie, the plot, the premise, the writers, was unconventional. The filmmakers shelt the idea. Meanwhile, Robert Zemeckis was given another chance to direct. 20th century Fox hired him to work on a sci-fi movie called Cocoon. While he worked on that film, he came across another screenplay. It was about a successful romance novelist who travels to Columbia to save her sister from kidnappers. It was part comedy, part action adventure. By minimum price for taking a stranded woman to a telephone is $400.

Will you take $375 in travel's text. American Express? Of course. Robert Zemeckis began to work on that film while also directing Cocoon. But when he showed an early version of the romantic action movie to a film executive, it didn't go well. It seemed like more failure was imminent. Eager to get ahead of a disaster, 20th Century Fox fired Robert Zemekis as the director of Cocoon.

He was perilously close to becoming a pariah in Hollywood. But then, something surprising happened. His romantic jungle adventure comedy was released and became a hit. It was called Romancing the Stone. The movie is an upbeat whimsical, romantic action picture. There's a great deal of fun. It's a modern day buried. After Romancing the Stone became a runaway success, Hollywood came to see the filmmakers' experiments in a new light. The fact that used cars and 1941 and Romancing the stone were all wildly different movies,

meant that this was a director who could not be pigeonholed. Robert Zemeckis was an iconoclast. Studios understood that this was a director who needed a long leash of creative freedom in order to do his best work. Capitalizing on his newfound stardom, the director said, Okay, what about that family time travel movie that's been sitting on the shelf? This time, the Hollywood executives said yes. The movie was called Back to the Future.

It was a love story and a family story and an action adventure rolled into one. It was part sci-fi, part romantic comedy, and all Robert Zameckis. I loved it for the moment I saw it, and every time ever since then watching it, I love it even more. Justin Berg is a fan. To me, it's the closest thing to a perfect movie that I could imagine. I've probably seen the first one, I don't know, close to 70 times. 70 times? Probably by now.

Oh my god. It's hard to count at this point. 70 times might be an exaggeration, but Justin has seen the movie a lot. When he's not watching back to the future, he's a researcher in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. If you're not familiar with the movie, it tells the story of a teenager,

Marty McFly, who meets an eccentric scientist who has built a time machine out of a DMC delorean. The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it some style? Besides! Marty takes a trip in the delorean and goes back in time to when his parents were in high school and before they were a couple. He sees his future dad almost being hit by a car and pushes him out of the way. The problem is that in the original timeline, the car accident was how Marty's mom and

Marty's dad meet one another and come together as a couple. I remember, according to my theory, you interfere with your parents for a speedy. They don't meet, they won't fall in love, they won't get married, and they won't have kids. That's why your older brother's just a friend. He now has to figure out how to make his parents fall in love with each other. So anyway, George, Valorant, she really likes you. She told me to tell you that she wants you to ask her to be a chairman of a CD. The story, the characters, the acting, the pacing, the way it all comes together, the music,

the aesthetics, just how compelling and how gripping and how much you root for Marty and Doc from, you know, really early on the film to the end. The movie takes risks. One of the plot lines involves Marty meeting his own mom. His mom is a teenager and they are roughly the same age. To Marty's consternation, his mom becomes infatuated with him instead of with his dad. I've never seen Purple underwear before Calvin.

Calvin, why do you keep calling me Calvin? Well, that is your name, isn't it? Calvin Klein? It's written all over your underwear. No, actually people. Call me Marty. Oh, please to meet you Calvin. Marty? What I love about that scene is that you can sort of see Marty's discomfort even as his mom is increasingly interested in him. And we are seeing the philosophical and psychological implications here. And all of that is happening at the same point where multiple things are happening, but it's happening at a very successful level, comedically, psychologically, and perhaps even philosophically. Yeah, and this is the aspect of the movie that Disney didn't like. They said,

we Disney cannot make a movie about a mother falling in love with her son, you know, we're Disney. And I can understand why Disney would respond that way, having just read the screenplay and not seeing the movie actually made and made so brilliantly. Once you see it on screen in line with Semeckas' vision, it's just funny and it works and it doesn't seem you know, queasy or cringey. You know, it just works. Back to the future became a massive success. It was the highest grossing film in 1985,

earning nearly $400 million worldwide. Film critic Roger Ebert said back to the future offered humanity, charm, and humor. Robert Zemeckis' career had taken a complete U-turn. He was suddenly one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Irvin Kirschner's career had flatlined. Well, Kirschner was on top of the world after Empire Strikes Back as he should have been. It was a smash it and he did it beautifully well.

But his career after that didn't really take off in the way one might expect. The rest of his career was just a couple of sequels and that was it. And we would have expected Zamekis to exit Hollywood. He's got fired from Cucun. He was kind of on the bottom of the world. And then Romance in the Stone hit and it gave him the opportunity to make back the future, which of course became a smash hit. And then his reputation was truly cemented as a novel creative brilliant filmmaker. In an interview at the time,

Robert Zemeckis was asked if he would ever want to make non-commodies. He replied, I would like to be able to do everything. Kirstner became known as sequel guy for understandable reasons. He made a smash hit sequel. Zemeckis, I think, came to be known in Hollywood and to audiences as someone who can almost do anything. He had this just in a few films in his early portfolio covered so much terrain and did

so many different things. Even within the context of one or two movies, where Manson's turned back to the future, they were so kind of complicated, and had a lot of different elements to them, that I think he was not pigeonholed. So his reputation was just, you know, as a filmmaker broadly,

and that gave him a lot of opportunities, and made him really adaptable. Robert Zamekis came to be seen as brilliant, daring and unpredictable. His movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, had cartoon characters and live human actors. It was a comedy, action, fantasy, murder mystery. By the mid-90s, people who came to watch each new Robert Zamekis movie had no idea what they were going to get. Hollywood stars wanted to work with the director. Everything he touched seemed to be innovative. In 1994, he made a movie about an Alabama man named Forest Gump.

His name's Forest. Like me. I named him after his daddy. He got a daddy named Forest Gump. All his life the people around Forest told him he wasn't smart. Yet, while the world mocked him for being slow, it was Forest who had the last laugh. His kindness, his generosity, was stronger than the cruelty of those who mocked him. In time, people came to see that forest, played by Tom Hanks, was wise, even if he wasn't smart. I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." Robert Zamekis won an Oscar for Best Director.

Soon he teamed up again with Tom Hanks to make a strange movie about a FedEx employee who washes up on a deserted island after a plane crash. His only friend is a volleyball has feelings too. You can kind of see threads to his early work in all of these films because this early work was so broad broad diverse and novel. I mean it's fascinating because you would think that there's not much you can do with one guy on a on a on a deserted island and a volleyball and yet the movie is sort of rich and intense and holds your attention from start

to finish. It's another film that just that works despite the fact that you wouldn't expect it to work if you just read the screenplay and you didn't know that Robert Zamekis was about to direct it. Over the next several decades, Robert Zamekis would remain a prolific filmmaker, producing a number of films and TV shows. Meanwhile, Oven Kushner's career, which had started out looking so much more promising than Robert Zemeckis's career, never returned to the highs of the Empire Strikes Back and never say never again.

He died in 2010. So what makes a Kushner a Kushner and a Zamekis a Zamekis? Why are some creators shooting stars that quickly burn out while others find themselves on a sustained trajectory of success? As a researcher who studies creativity, Justin became very interested in how outliers like Robert Zamekis achieve outside success. I'm just an awe of seeing creators do what they do. Being a fan of movies and TV shows and books and all the various creative industry products, it's just kind of amazing to think that these things were created by people. And even more amazing to think,

some creators do this over and over again and create things that we love and remember and cherish and talk to about with other people. And they somehow managed to kind of keep doing it. It's a bit like, you know, a magic trick and wanted to understand how the magic trick works. And so that I've dedicated my my life figuring out, to kind of demystifying what creators do and how they actually make build creative ideas and make things happen from nothing. Creative industries, of course, draw large numbers of people who are looking to make a name for themselves. Inumerable people want to be writers, filmmakers, and musicians.

If success was predictable, you might expect to see what mathematicians call a normal distribution. If you line up human beings by height, the very tall and the very short are in the minority, most people are average. But in creative industries, Justin says, most people are average. But in creative industries, Justin says, most people are unsuccessful. A handful achieve brief success. A very tiny number achieve sustained, outside success.

It's that pattern we talked about, the Power Law Distribution. Power Law Distribution is a very skewed distribution where if we look at all the creators that have one or more hits, so this doesn't count the people who have zero hits, which is actually the vast majority of creators. But if we just look at the small slice of critters who are fortunate and talented enough to get one hit, half or more are going to be one hit wonders. In other words, they're going to have exactly one hit in their entire career. And only a small handful of critters are going to be one-hit wonders. In other words, they're going to have exactly one hit in their entire career. And only a small handful of creators are going to have several more hits

in their career. And so it's this very skewed distribution where most just have one, two, maybe three. And then very, very few have several or more. The sustained success of some creators is all the more puzzling when you consider that there are always new writers, filmmakers and musicians who are looking to make their mark. In these creative industries because things churn a lot and there's a constant new entrance and there's a high degree of competition and pace of change, success is much less predictable, there's more randomness, and it's more difficult for creators to be able to sustain success. One way to think about this is that people who achieve sustained success in creative industries

have made it through an extremely difficult obstacle course. The first challenge is to get noticed at all. The second obstacle, if you make it past the first, is to sustain that initial success. These may seem like similar challenges, but in fact, they are not. When we come back, Justin's research uncovers a cruel truth.

The very thing that helps you get past the first obstacle makes it harder to get past the second. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some years ago, I interviewed the researcher Homen Aguinness. He evaluated the performance of people in a wide variety of fields. He found that success was distributed unequally. We looked at researchers, we looked at entertainers, we looked at politicians, and we looked at collegiate as well as professional athletes. In each of these kinds of industries we found that is more minority of superstar performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the output.

You can see the same thing for yourself if you look at the charts of bestselling books or the music charts. You'll see lots of churn, meaning a steady stream of new entrance, but most of these are one hit wonders. Like shooting stars, they shine brightly for a moment, and then vanish. You'll also find a small number of authors and musicians who consistently stay atop the charts. At Stanford University, Justin Berg was curious about why this happens. Why do some creative artists have momentary success, while others have sustained success?

To try to answer this question, he looked at one specific arm of the entertainment industry, the music business. If you're interested in studying sustained success in the context of a creative industry, studying music is a little bit like a biologist studying fruit flies because you get to see a lot of life cycles because it's arguably the fastest moving, highest churn industry of all the

creative industries. Justin conducted a massive study that looked at musicians who never become successful, those who only had one hit song and those who generated hit after hit after hit. He tracked nearly 70,000 artists who had been signed by a label between the years of 1959 and 2010. Then he measured how many of their songs had cracked the Billboard Hot 100 list. In total, he ended up analyzing 3 million songs. You know, in my data set, if you look at artists who have been signed by major labels and any label that's had a hit, so about 70,000 artists, 93% have had zero hits.

And only 7% have had one or more hits. And then about half of that 7% have only had one hit. A very consistent finding across creative industries is that half or more of creators are one hit wonders if they have a hit at all. And so what have been the ways people have tried to understand this? I want to get to your research in just a second, but I'm wondering how people have tried to understand this phenomenon. I mean, I think at least what explanation is, well, Shakespeare, a Shakespeare,

you have people who are just sort of creative geniuses, and when those people come along, they are the people who have sustained success. If you can just give me a painting to picture of what some of the theories were, that you've encountered in the past that explains sort of this unusual finding. One thought that comes to mind is individual talent.

That some creators are just inherently innately more talented than others. That's a possible explanation. Another one is quality of works, quality of products. It's a pretty consistent finding in the research literature that highly successful creators produce more content, they produce more works, they produce more products than that increases their odds

of having hits and sustaining long career with hits. There's also the concept of something called cumulative advantage. This is the idea that once you have a lot of success, you're no longer starting from scratch with each new album. You can build on your mountain of success to create an even bigger mountain. If you're a Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen, you know, already quite famous and you have a lot of marketing muscle behind you and you have a fan base that's already a ravenous,

eager for your next album to drop. We have good theories to explain how they sustain success. But that's long after they've already become a hitmaker. They've had several more hits. Then we know that resources and opportunities accrue to that very lead group of the top 1% of the top 1% kind of creators. But there's fewer theories to kind of explain how creators become hitmakers to begin with.

And I'm wondering, were you not persuaded by these theories? I mean, each of them in some ways, at least sounds plausible. I've persuaded by all of them. So I do think talent plays some role, but I think that nearly all creators that have one or two hits are pretty darn talented. And if you take a closer look, you know, in a more grander way and try to kind of compare the talent of a lot of creators that become one hit wonders compared to hit makers, talent doesn't really seem to be the whole story. Maybe a little bit of it, but not the whole story. I totally buy that quantity also plays a big role.

That's just kind of a mathematical, you know, truism that if you have more products, the likelihood that you're going to have any one of them hit is higher. But I don't know that that explains all the variance and whether you become one hit wonder or hit maker, just like town. It explains some of it. You do have to keep producing work. You can't quit.

You can't give up. But Quaid also doesn't tell the whole story. And of course, with cumulative advantage, that's a very robust finding in social science that the success begets success. So those who have already become hitmakers, we can predict that their next album or their next film, their next book is going to do well with more certainty than a new entrant. But my research kind of enters in of how do you get to that level to begin with.

As Justin began to approach his question, he had a thought. Most people analyzing success looked at the successful songs and movies of creators. When we think of Robert Zemeckis' career, we think of back to the future and forest gum and cast away. But what about his older work? The work that wasn't successful. Movies like used cars or that comedy about the Pearl Harbor attacks. And it struck me that researchers have not really looked at how a creator's passport folio is predicting future success. We'd call that in the literature path dependence. So path dependence is the idea that what happens early in a process can limit the range of options you have by the end of that process.

And as a creativity researcher, what I looked at the existing literature on sort of sustained success and creative careers, most of the research was looking at, you know, how creative a given product is at a given time, you know, how novel it is or how much variety it adds to a creator's portfolio. And then using that to try to predict whether that product would be successful. It didn't look at path dependence, which would be how does past products. So the products that the creator has generated and released to the market in the past, how does that influence future performance? And so it dawned on me that that's just a huge,

overlooked factor that portfolios could be carriers of history that end up having enduring implications beyond that moment when each product was released. And so I brought that perspective to bear on the music industry. Of course, one reason it's very hard to analyze how a musician's initial songs in career might offer clues to her later success is that this is very hard to do on a massive scale. So sure, you can analyze the early songs of the Beatles or the early songs of Taylor Swift

once you know they are superstars. But if there is useful information in the early careers of musicians, it's not enough to analyze the superstars. You have to analyze everyone so you can figure out what the superstars are doing differently. You have to study the vast majority of musicians who never have a hit, the smaller number who have a single hit, and the tiny minority who have sustained success. The only way to do this is by computing enormous amounts of information. Justin algorithmically dissected millions of songs by thousands of artists

into a number of different sonic features from tempo to time signature. He wanted to see whether they were patterns common to musicians who had no hits, musicians who were one hit wonders, and musicians who scored hit after hit after hit. He looked at two ideas. Novelty and Variety. Novelty is how unique a song is compared to the other songs in the marketplace at the time.

So basically, novelty is how unique a song is compared to the recent songs in the marketplace at the time. So basically novelty is how unique a song is compared to the recent hits in the market. And variety is how different your songs within your portfolio are to one another. So variety is internal to the creator's own portfolio. We'll come back to the idea of variety in a moment. But looking first at novelty, you might think it would be a predictor of success. If you want to make a mark for yourself, doesn't it make sense to come up with something

startlingly new and daring that no one has ever done before? That might make sense intuitively, but it fails to recognize that songs and genres that are popular are popular for a very simple reason. Audiences want to listen to them. When you give audiences something very new, they're likely to go, what the heck is this? Novelty is a negative predictor of initial success, meaning that the creators who release novel songs are less likely to ever have a hit. They're more likely to strike out and we never really hear about them. So, if the creator builds a novel portfolio, that's a bunch of unique songs that sort of stand out compared to what's hit recently in the market, they are less likely to ever have a hit in their career. Conversely, creators who build typical portfolios, so songs that sound very similar to what's

popular at the time, they are more likely to have a hit in their career, they're more likely to have an initial hit, but they're also more likely then to become a one-hit wonder after that initial hit. Think back to the story of Irvin Kushner. Star Wars might have been a novel idea when it came out, but the idea of an intergalactic space war was hardly novel in the Empire Strikes Back. A sequel is pretty much the definition of a movie style that is not novel. Compared this to Robert Zemeckis, whose early movies were pretty unusual, and were all flops. 1941, a comedy about the bombing of Pearl Harbor is as novel as it gets, and it received

a stony face response from audiences. So if you want to produce a hit, novelty is risky. But here's the catch. When it comes to building sustained success, novelty now becomes a huge advantage. So if you do manage to build a novel portfolio and then have an initial hit, that novel portfolio acts as sort of a resource for sustained success. So those who reach their initial hits with a novel portfolio are more likely to have additional hits. In other words, if creators are able to beat the odds and find success with novel ideas,

that novelty becomes the driver for further success. There's two reasons for this, and I call them internal learning and external expectations. So internal learning is just the fact that you've learned more from that novel portfolio than you would have if you had built a typical portfolio. You learn more and you also learn more adaptable lessons. It's so for external expectations, that's about how the outside world thinks of you. So this is the audience and key gatekeepers in the industry, whether it's executives or disc jockeys or agents, producers, etc. And so if you have built a novel portfolio and then had an initial hit with that novel portfolio, you are now seen as someone who's, you know, an innovator and, you know, people are more open to you coming

out with new music. And it essentially makes you more adaptable over time. I mean, in some ways, this sounds like the story of Robert Zemeckis. I think so. You know, I want to hold your hand was not super novel, but used cars certainly was, romantic in the stone, certainly was, 1941, certainly was. And I think he learned a lot from all these films. And then he took all that, everything that he learned, and he put it in back to the future.

And that's, you know, became his first smash hit. Right, and then the fact is that he had this experience with all these different things and that helped him as he was building, you know, Castaway and Forest Gump and contact and other movies. Yeah, I think both Thurne and external expectations helped, you know, serve his sustained success. So he learned something from that early portfolio, but then also the outside world came to see him as this brilliant novel creative filmmaker who can do anything.

So then it allowed him to pursue a broader array of films after his initial hits. Notice the cruel irony here. The very thing that makes you more likely to have initial success works against you when it comes to sustained success. The very thing that helps you have sustained success works against you when it comes to getting your initial breakthrough. Here was an explanation for the Power Law distribution and music. To become a superstar, you need to overcome two obstacles, where your chances of overcoming the first reduce your chances of overcoming the second.

Justin has looked at two singers who exemplify this idea. Rebi Jackson and Janet Jackson. Rebi and Janet Jackson got their start in a very similar way. They were introduced to the world on the TV show The Jackson's, which also introduced Michael Jackson in The Jackson 5 to The World. That was in the late 70s. And then both Rebbe and Janet Jackson had their debuts as solo artists in the early to mid 1980s.

Rebbe released her debut album in 1984. It contained the hit song, Centipede. Around the same time, Rebbe's younger sister, Janet, released her own debut album. Both of them actually started off pretty successfully. They both actually had a top 100 hit on their debut albums. Now from there, their careers took very different trajectories. Rebi, by Justin's calculations, was a one-hit wonder. None of her subsequent songs came close to the success of Centipede.

And of course, Janet Jackson has become one of the best selling artists of all time, with 41 hits and counting. And how do you think their backgrounds in terms of novelty and variety speak to the research that you have done, Justin? So their initial portfolio, so their portfolio at the time of their initial hits were, of course, their debut albums because they both got their first hits from their debut albums. So we can do a pretty good head-to-head comparison.

As it turns out, this is what my model would predict, so Janet scores higher in novelty than Rebi. And that song that Rebi had in 1984 was, I understand, actually Michael Jackson, who was a huge star at the time, actually helped to write and produce the song. And it sounds a little bit like Michael Jackson. It has his signature all over it. So that speaks in some ways to what you're talking about in terms of the song having, you know, star appeal, but not a lot of novelty.

Exactly. novelty is both an advantage and a disadvantage for creators. If you're a creator with conventional ideas, you probably won't have long-term success. But if you're a creator with unconventional ideas, you'll have a hard time getting those ideas off the ground in the first place. There's this diameter trade-off between those two approaches. Do you produce songs that are different from the market, or do you produce songs that sound similar to what's been recently popular? Because of this trade-off, if you're a new creator, a new artist in the music industry,

trying to decide how to construct your portfolio, you actually can't maximize your odds of becoming a hitmaker without simultaneously increasing your odds of having zero hits in your career. It helps explain why music and similar creative industries are so high-churned, how they chew up and spit out creators so quickly. We end up with this bizarre distribution of a lot of one-hit wonders and very few hitmakers. I can imagine that some creators are going to say while I have another hack around the conundrum that Justin is posing, and the hack is to basically try and get initial success by being conventional and then switch to being creative afterwards. Does that work?

What my research would suggest is no no, that wouldn't work. That the path dependence gets triggered at the time of the initial hit and that your portfolio becomes a carrier of history that really kind of sticks with you for the rest of your career. Can it be done? Sure, it can be done. But the odds are really stacked against you

if you have a typical portfolio early in your career, because the industry is going to pass you by pretty quickly. You're going to be known for that sound. People are going to associate you with that particular milieu and as new sounds, new artists inevitably enter the marketplace, you'll likely be left behind regardless of the effort that you put in. you'll likely be left behind regardless of the effort that you put in. Creative industries are marked by very high levels of change. Audiences want what they want until they don't. To put this another way, musicians and movie makers who have sustained success are able to evolve with the tastes of their audience.

Romancing the stone, for example, had a damsel and distress theme that might not go over well with audiences today. Back to the future, had stereotypical references to Libyan terrorists that sound xenophobic today. To be a successful artist over time, you have to change with the times, and this is where having a fairly limited repertoire in your early work can make it difficult to compete with new entrants who are closer to the zeitgeist. So what is a creator to do?

Stick to the conventional and run the risk of becoming a one-hit wonder? Or try the novel? And risk becoming a no-hit failure. This is where the second dimension Justin studied may come in useful. Novelty looks at how unusual the creator is. Variety examines the creator's range. One thing to keep in mind is that variety is a way to offset some of the trade-off with novelty. So if you come out with a really novel sounding song, but then you just do a whole album of

songs that sound like that one novel song, that's a portfolio that's high novelty but low in variety. And what's more optimal is to have a, you know, that first album or first two albums, rate high novelty. So you want those songs to sound different from what's popular at the time, but have a wide variety of novel songs. So you want them to sound different in different ways.

And that's one way to try to overcome this thorny tradeoff with novelty. And so we see that with Simecus. He, you know, he has novel films early in his career, but they're very different from one another. And so that increased the odds that anyone would be a hit, and indeed we saw that with romance in the stone, that it was a highly novel film that ended up being a hit. It makes logical sense. Trying new things decreases your odds of initial success, but trying lots

of different new things can increase your odds of initial success. But trying lots of different new things can increase your odds of initial success. If you throw a lot of different novel ideas at the wall, the likelihood that one of them will stick goes up. So you can't completely offset the thorny trade-off with novelty, but if you do a variety of novel things, it's more likely that any one of them is going to be a hit and going to succeed, and that's really what Simecast did.

Justin Berg studies organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Justin, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, this was a lot of fun. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our run song here today is Harmony Gerudic at Descript.

Descript is a software program that we use here at Hidden Brain to transcribe our interviews and write rough drafts of our scripts. We had some questions about changes that discriples rolling out, so Harmony put together a training to walk our team through those changes. She was very patient with our questions and genuinely interested in hearing our feedback and suggestions. Thank you Harmony for your help. We're truly grateful. If you love the ideas that we feature on the show, then please consider joining Hidden Brain Plus, our subscription channel, available on Apple Podcasts.

You'll find new episodes not available anywhere else, plus the chance to have your questions answered by the researchers we feature on the show. Find Hidden Brain Plus on the Apple Podcasts app or go to Apple.co slash Hidden Brain to try it for free. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.