Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity. The history of science is a long story about good ideas facing rejection after punishing rejection until enough scientists become acquainted with the concepts, at which point they become law. Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum theory, said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success.

The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do.

To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

But the fact that people gravitate to fluency in art and design is no excuse for dumb simplicity. The central insight of MAYA is that people actually prefer complexity—up to the point that they stop understanding something. Many of today’s museumgoers don’t just stare at the water lilies. They enjoy strange and abstract art that gives them a feeling or a jolt of meaning. TV viewers don’t just watch reruns. They like complex mysteries with narrative puzzles that come to completion. Theatergoers love familiar revivals, but the most influential Broadway smash hits are ones, like Hamilton, that tell a familiar story in an ingeniously new way. The power of fluency, after all, is strongest when it emerges from its opposite, a challenging period of disfluency, to create an aha moment.

People sometimes don’t know what they want until they already love it.

If pop music were a global technology, Sweden would be its Silicon Valley. Sweden and Swedish expats are the world’s inexhaustible fount of catchy melodies.

More than an illusive trick, repetition is the God particle of music.

when we feel like we can accurately make tiny predictions about how a song is going to go, it feels really good.”

An earworm is a cognitive quarrel. The automatic mind craves repetition that the aware brain finds annoying.

Music is like memory candy.

Simple political rhetoric didn’t undermine American democracy. The growth of American democracy made political rhetoric simple.

Musical language is mercenary. It cares about winning an attention war, and truth can be left bleeding on the field. People trust beautiful words, even when they’re wrong.

The strange truth is that all speech is composed of microscopic melodies and undiscovered songs. It just takes a little repeating to hear the music.

All of my favorite books perform this trick. Initially, they seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection. I imagine, but can never be sure, that everybody feels the same way about books. Tolstoy did. Art is the universal window, he said, a collective view into “the oneness of life’s joys and sorrows.”

People enjoy repeating cultural experiences, not only because they want to remember the art, but also because they want to remember themselves, and there is joy in the act of remembering.

Stories are a kind of sorcery. Like repetition and anaphora, they can seduce the mythmaking mind and can suppress the kind of deeper thinking that is also quite necessary to understand the truth of things. A great story that serves the wrong purpose is a dangerous thing.

The mere repetition of a phrase or idea, even one labeled false, might confuse many people in the long run, because it is so easy to conflate familiarity with truth.

Disfluency is like a subtle alarm, piercing the calm of automatic processing, summoning a higher level of attention.

It is precisely because great narratives seduce us that the best stories deserve the greatest skepticism.

there is no such thing as universal and timeless good taste in clothes, names, music, or perhaps anything. There are only present tastes, past tastes, and slightly ahead-of-the-present tastes.

It’s not a coincidence that the “golden age of TV” coincided with the “franchise age of movies.”

There is an idea called Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the number of its users squared.

In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano and Christian are foils. But in the real world, many people are both the silver-tongued Cyrano and leaden Christian in one body. They sparkle with wit and panache in front of a keyboard or a piece of paper. But dumped before a friend, a date, or a boss without a script, they’ll talk about their marriage woes or the awful commute.

Publicly, people often talk about issues. Privately, they talk about schedules. Publicly, they deploy strategic emotions. Privately, they tend to share small troubles. Publicly, they want to be interesting. Privately, they want to be understood.

Humans are prostalgic, enamored by little predictions. But the future is an anarchy that refuses to be governed by even the soundest forecasts.

When it comes to predicting the future, ignorance is a club and everybody is a member.

Art may be invaluable, but it’s not free. One way or another, someone has to pay.