Success 2.0: Getting to the Top and Staying There

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the late 16th century, a playwright named Thomas Kyd wrote a tragedy. It was about an aristocrat who seeks revenge after his son is murdered. Murder!

Murder! Help her out of her way!

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 chilled my throbbing heart with trembling fear? Which never danger yet could daunt before. Thomas Kyd'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 Kyd's career flatlined after the Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare wrote masterpiece After masterpiece. Alas, poor Yorick.

Tragedies.

I knew him, Horatio. Followed by comedies.

Reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

Followed by historical dramas and more.

Love is not love which alters when its alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

Shakespeare's plays have been translated into dozens of languages. They continue to be performed 400 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 isn't gold or there's method in his madness, you're quoting Shakespeare. What explains the gulf between Thomas Kyd'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 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? Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual From the Virtual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want— a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible. Because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. 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 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 2 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. You're who?

I'm here to rescue you. I've got your R2 unit.

I'm here with Ben Kenobi.

Ben Kenobi?

Where is he?

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. 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 Wars fan. In fact, Irvin Kershner 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 Kershner 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, he's going to lose his shirt in this. Fox is financing this piece of junk. Oh, we were sick for George. Sick. Of course, Irvin Kershner 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 as 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 Kershner 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?

Hi friends, Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we're battling inflation—

Used Cars was a lowbrow comedy that followed the story of a sleazy car salesman who had dreams of getting into politics. It was packed with raunch and gallows humor.

Now, I talked to the party chairman last week. 60 grand buys me the nomination, and I'm a shoo-in.

60 grand, huh?

That's all it takes nowadays? Bah, that's kind of like a down payment, you know. Once I'm in, I go 50-50 on all the graft I take in.

I watched Used Cars recently. It feels like 3 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 2 out of 4 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 Zemeckis. He was a graduate of the USC Film School, too. But while Irvin Kershner'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. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Set in 1964, it told the story of a group of teenagers who were determined to meet the Beatles.

I figured out a way to get into the Beatles Hotel. Damn, Rosie, control yourself.

There's still a hitch. Around the same time, he co-wrote 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 filmed, 1941. Sayonara, sucker! 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's career was struggling, Irvin Kershner released another hit, Never Say Never Again. It was another sequel, this time in the hugely popular James Bond franchise.

I made you all wet. Yes, but my martini's still dry. My name's James.

You ski very well. 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 Kershner had become the king of sequels, a director with a magic touch. Robert Zemeckis looked like a dilettante. 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the mid-1980s, 2 filmmakers in Hollywood got famous for different reasons. Irvin Kershner was an established director who made The Empire Strikes Back and Never Say Never Again, huge commercial successes. Robert Zemeckis 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 Zemeckis 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 in 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 shelled 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 Colombia to save her sister from kidnappers. It was part comedy, part action-adventure.

My minimum price for taking a stranded woman to a telephone is $400. Will you take $375 in traveler's checks?

American Express? Of course.

Got a deal.

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 Zemeckis 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 that is a great deal of fun. It's a modern-day buried treasure— After Romancing the Stone became a runaway success, Hollywood came to see the filmmaker's 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 Zemeckis.

I loved it from 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 gosh.

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 with 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—

Dad!

—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. Now remember, according to my theory, you interfered with your parents' first meeting. If 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 disappointed in you. He now has to figure out how to make his parents fall in love with each other.

So anyway, George, about Lorraine, she really likes you. She told me to tell you that she wants you to ask her to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. The story, the characters, the acting, the pacing, the way it all comes together, the music, the aesthetics, um, just how compelling and how gripping and how much you root for Marty and Doc. From, you know, really early on in the film to the end.

The movie takes risks. One of the plotlines 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, 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.

Pleased to meet you, Calvin. Marty. What I love about that scene is that you can sort of see Marty's discomfort even as his, 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, Disney cannot make a movie about a mother falling in love with her son. 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 Zemeckis's 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's career had taken a complete U-turn. He was suddenly one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Irvin Kershner's career had flatlined.

Well, Kershner was on top of the world after Empire Strikes Back, as he should have been. It was a smash hit, and he did He did it, you know, beautifully well. Um, but, you know, 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, and that was it. And we would have expected Zemeckis to exit Hollywood. Um, you know, he got fired from Cocoon. He was kind of on the bottom of the world. Um, and then Romancing 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-comedies. He replied, I would like to be able to do everything.

Kirshner 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. You know, 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, Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future. They were so kind of complicated and had a lot of different elements to them. that I think, you know, 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 Zemeckis 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.

I don't! You do!

I don't!

You do!

I don't! You do!

I don't!

By the mid-'90s, people who came to watch each new Robert Zemeckis 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 Forrest Gump.

His name's Forrest.

Like me. I named him after his daddy. He got a daddy named Forrest too? All his life, the people around Forrest told him he wasn't smart. Yet, while the world mocked him for being slow, it was Forrest 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 Forrest, 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 Zemeckis 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 whom he calls Wilson. Wilson! Oh! Oh, never again! Never again. You're okay. You're okay. If Used Cars made me hate all the characters, Cast Away made me think a volleyball has feelings too.

You can kind of see threads to his early work in all of these films because his early work was so broad, diverse, and novel.

I mean, and it's fascinating because you would think that there's not much you can do with one guy 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 Zemeckis was about to direct it.

Over the next several decades, Robert Zemeckis would remain a prolific filmmaker, producing a number of films and TV shows. Meanwhile, Irvin Kershner'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 Kirshner a Kirshner and a Zemeckis a Zemeckis? 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 Zemeckis achieve outsized success.

I'm just in awe of seeing creators do what they do. Um, 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, um, and they somehow manage to kind of keep doing it. Um, it's a bit like, you know, a magic trick and wanting to understand how the magic trick works. And so that I've dedicated my, my life to figuring out, to kind of demystifying, um, you know, what creators do, um, and how they actually, um, you know, make— build creative ideas and make things happen from, from nothing.

Creative industries, of course, draw large numbers of people who are looking to make a name for themselves. Innumerable 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 unsuccessful. A handful achieve brief success. A very tiny number achieve sustained, outsized success. It's that pattern we talked about, the power law distribution.

Power law distribution, it's a very skewed distribution where if we, 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 The small slice of creators 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 creators are going to have several more hits in their career. And so it's this very skewed distribution where most just have 1, 2, maybe 3, 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 constant new entrants 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, you know, 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 Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell.

And I'm Laura Maxwell. My name is Liz Swell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth.

Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some years ago, I interviewed the researcher Herman Aguinis. 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 a small 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 entrants, 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 'cause it's arguably the fastest moving, highest churn industry of, 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 dataset, if you look at artists who have been signed by kind of major labels and any label who have, you know, 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, and I think at least one explanation is, well, Shakespeare is Shakespeare. You have people who are just sort of creative geniuses. And when those people come along, they're the people who have sustained success. If you can just give me a— paint a picture of what some of the theories were that that you've encountered in the past that explains sort of this unusual finding?

You know, one thought that comes to mind is individual talent, you know, that some creators are just inherently and innately more talented than others, and that could, you know, that's a possible explanation. Another one is quantity of works, quantity of products. You know, 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, and that increases their odds of having hits and sustaining a 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 Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen, already quite famous, and you have a lot of marketing muscle behind you, and you have a fan base that's already 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 elite group of, you know, the top 1% of the top 1% kind of creators. But there's fewer, 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, um, at least sounds plausible.

I'm persuaded by all of them. So I do think, you know, talent plays some role, but I think that nearly all creators that have 1 or 2 hits are pretty darn talented. And if you take a closer look, um, 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 hitmakers, talent doesn't really seem to be the whole story. Maybe a little bit of it, but not the whole story. And 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 like all the variance in whether you become You know, one-hit wonder, hitmaker, just like talent. It explains some of it. You have to— you do have to keep producing work. You can't quit. You can't give up. But quantity also doesn't tell the whole story. And of course, with cumulative advantage, that's a very robust finding in social science that the, you know, 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's career, we think of Back to the Future. and Forrest Gump 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, you know, researchers have not really looked at how a creator's past portfolio 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, when I looked at the existing literature on sort of sustained success in 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, 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 and 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 there 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 2 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 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 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 a 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, you know, 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 Kershner. 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. Compare 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-faced 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 2 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. And 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, um, you know, people are more open to you, um, 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, uh, Used Cars certainly was. Romancing the Stone certainly was. 1941 certainly was. And I think he learned a lot from all these films, and then he took All of 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, uh, this experience with all these different things, and, and that helped him as he was building, uh, you know, Cast Away and Forrest Gump and Contact and, and other movies.

Yeah, I think both learning 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, um, 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 in music. To become a superstar, you need to overcome 2 obstacles where your chances of overcoming the first reduce your chances of overcoming the second. Justin has looked at 2 singers who exemplify this idea. Rebbie Jackson and Janet Jackson.

Rebbie and Janet Jackson got their start in a very similar way. They were introduced to the world on the TV show The Jacksons, which also introduced Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 to, to the world. That was in the late '70s. And then both Rebbie and Janet Jackson had their debuts as solo artists in the early to mid-1980s.

Rebbie released her debut album in 1984. It contained the hit song Centipede. Around the same time, Rebbie's younger sister Janet released her own debut album.

Both of them actually started off, you know, pretty successfully. They both actually had a top 100 hit on their debut albums. Now from there, their careers took very different trajectories.

Rebbie, 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 portfolios, so their portfolios at the time of their initial hits, were of course their debut albums because they both got their first hits from their debut albums. And so we can do a pretty good head-to-head comparison. And as it turns out, uh, you know, and this is what my model would predict, so Janet scores higher in novelty than Rebbie.

Hmm. And, and that song that Rebbie had in 1984, uh, 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 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 diametric trade-off between those 2 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.

Mm-hmm.

It helps explain why music and similar creative industries are so high churn, how they chew up and spit out creators so quickly, and we end up with this, you know, kind of bizarre distribution of a lot of one-hit wonders and very few hitmakers.

Now, I can imagine that some creators are going to say, well, 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, 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.

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 moviemakers who have sustained success are able to evolve with the tastes of their audience. Romancing the Stone, for example, had a damsel-in-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-offs 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 2 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 trade-off with novelty. And so we see that with Zemeckis. 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 any one would be a hit. And indeed, we saw that with Romancing 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. 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 Zemeckis 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 Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Harmony Jerudik, 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 Descript was 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.

Thank you.

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