Before adopting programming as my job and passion, I was a professional actor and I plan on continuing to act professionally when I move back to to a place where it is more avaialble. Working professionally in many capacities for many years, I can tell you that luck certainly helps, for some people. This author completely discounts artists who trained, worked and pushed themselves for years and years to get where they are: regularly hired for awesome roles, being paid well, and doing it professionally day after day for their livelihood.
The fact is that pretty much every successful novelist, every successful pop star, every successful artist is successful mainly because of luck. Oftentimes there’s skill involved too, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers as you do in the tiny set of people who make it huge.
There are a few things I find very wrong with this paragraph:
1) The definition of success. Even under the assumption of monetary gain, this just isn't a good statement. Success, for an artist can be measured in many other ways. That aside: plenty of successful actors got to where they were because they tried harder than others. They showed up to more auditions than others. They worked hard training themselves in schools or other avenues. They were simply better at the profession with a greater understanding of how to get hired. This brings me to my next point.
2) Just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers.
This statement is just not true. You will only find handfuls of people that are capable of pulling off, even basic, performances necessary for a professional venue. They are the exceptions and they are skilled and talented. They get work because of this uniqueness. They don't appear in shows over and over again because they are lucky, they appear because they present artistic, or even monetary, value to the production.
I appreciated and enjoyed reading the article but the definitive nature of the statements from the author regarding "pretty much every" successful artist didn't sit well with me.
For the reasons that the author illustrated earlier in the article, yes people do get lucky. But I don't think the conclusions are appropriate to apply to the skillsets of artists in this way.
Artists can, and do, achieve successes on their own accord without lady luck. Sure, luck is helpful but for every 1 successful Hollywood star, there are scores of other successful artists working because they are simply better and more talented. You may never see these people on the silver screen. They are successful; in their own minds, and the minds of artists. All of this without regard to an agreed upon definition of success.
I'm a professional film director. I also agree 100% with this statement.
There is a huge variance in skill in all the creative professions.
I've had the opportunity to work with some extremely well-known actors. Within five minutes of starting working with them, it was obvious why they were so well-known - their skill at the craft was, to a man/woman, extraordinary.
That's something I've found to be the case in other contractors on films, too. Most of the time, in my experience, the 3D artists who get the top jobs or command the highest contracting fees are the most skilled and the easiest to work with, for example.
If you want a really good basic guide to success in the creative arts, I recommend Neil Gaiman's University of the Arts speech:
Love this speech. Thanks for linking it to the discussion. Neil Gaiman is incredibly talented and very intelligent. I was pleasantly surprised, the first time I saw this, by how good of an orator he is. That was my first exposure to him, outside of his comic books, and I found it very moving.
Highly suggest this speech for anyone; creative arts or otherwise.
Salmon's point isn't that there is no variance in creative skill, it's just that there isn't enough to matter in the scheme of being "the best in the world". There's not nearly enough variance to compensate for the luck required to be in the top 100 out of several million.
What you're describing is a "3-sigma" difference, but to be an A-list Hollywood star you'd need to be in something like the 50th sigma. That just isn't explainable by skill.
My problem with his article is that he seems to only define "success" and "recognition" in terms of being within that top 100.
There are a lot of startups that are profitable and have users loving their products that will never sell to Facebook for $1 billion. Using Salmon's argument, it takes pure luck to get to that Instagram-level of success. I buy that. I don't think it follows that all of those small profitable startups are therefore financial failures, which seems to be the conclusion he's drawn.
Um, the 50'th sigma is nonexistent on any physical scale. The 27'th sigma is 10^-317, and the 28'th sigma is too small to represent with doubles. For comparison, the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80.
Hollywood actors are, at best, in the 3-4'th sigma.
I don't have enough data to prove or disprove this statement - although I do know a lot of working and non-working artists, and anecdotally skill seems to win out.
I'd agree, if you're intending to be an A-list star and won't settle for anything less, luck is going to have to play a pretty significant role. But there are a lot of jobs and opportunities for an actor, for example, outside the "best of the best" situation.
I was mostly replying in support of the comment above from randomdrake, however.
I pretty much agree. There's definitely a factor of luck in hitting the gigantic jackpots in entertainment, but I think it's a lot less of a factor than is commonly imagined.
I selected films for a mid-sized film festival in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I watched thousands of films, and in the end I still ended up getting desperate for great films by the end of it. A friend of mine selects for Sundance, and even there he says the same thing.
There's not a lot of great undiscovered talent out there. There may be a lot of undeveloped talent, but that's because the people who have it haven't put in the time to develop it. It's tough but true.
Thanks for your additional insight. I really like your statement about there being less of an undiscovered talent market and perhaps more of an undeveloped talent market. Rings true in so many professions. I am not sure if there is good data to back up this assertion, or if it is just perspective, but I certainly find a lot of truth in your observation.
What I will say, however, is that luck still has something to do with it. The top tiers of actors have the money to purchase additional coaching, can attend more auditions because they aren't holding down another job, and can generally devote more of their life to the craft.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day. That film ends up successful, and ends up catapulting them into the big leagues -- one, if skillful and motivated, can parlay that first success into the next because they were able to work with a great director, which increased their skill; and are able to acquire more time to dedicate to acting. Thus, for the next audition, the two people once distinguishable by a better performance on that particular day now have a skill gap as well.
That luck was involved does not mean that one doesn't need to have skill, or that one doesn't need to make the most of an opportunity; rather, luck means that a coin flip happened that allowed someone to make the most of that chance.
The top tiers of actors have the money to purchase additional coaching, can attend more auditions because they aren't holding down another job, and can generally devote more of their life to the craft.
I'm sorry but I don't think this is true or a valid argument. If I may rephrase your assertion: are rich programmers better programmers because they have more resources to attend job interviews and can program more often? Whatever your craft may be, time (or money; same thing), doesn't necessarily mean anything about level of skill. Can it be a contributing factor? Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples on both sides of the coin to say one way or the other.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day.
It sounds, to me, like you're confusing luck for someone making a decision. Your assumption, that a director makes decisions on how the actor's hair looks that day, is extremely flawed. The truth is: there aren't 300 actors each coming in and doing everything the exact same, looking the exact same, and performing the exact same. Hell, there aren't even 2. Each one is an entire collection of skills, experience, head shots, and each one will deliver a different performance.
Professional and successful directors are, for the most part, incredibly skilled; masters of observation with uncanny abilities to find the right person for their vision.
Again, allow me to make the programmer analogy: if two programmers came in and wrote the exact same code, in the exact same amount of time, and produced the same output, on the same problem, where does that leave the decision? In the hands of the many other possibilities that the person hiring will take into consideration. Luck? No, it's someone making a decision.
Could that decision be based on whether their hair looked good in a certain light? Perhaps, but that would be absolutely silly for the person doing the hiring; they would gain nothing from it. They certainly wouldn't be a director working on a successful blockbuster movie if they really were making their decisions as haphazardly and with such flightiness as you assert they are. They will hire based on a multitude of reasons from, profitability, to talent, to personality, and all kinds of things in between.
I'm so much as saying they were two equally suitable choices, who both worked equally hard, but one happened to audition right after lunch. Regardless of the uncanny observation skills, we're still human and in the case of two great choices, even superficial differences such as the serotonin level of the director at the time of the first impression can matter.
However, the one who got the part, by nature of the increased experience, is now a better actor. This doesn't at all discount the hard work of the one who made it, but suggests that luck matters as well.
This doesn't discount those of us who work hard to create our own luck. As mentioned to another reply, you may have to roll yatzhee, but it is your hard work that gives you 1,000 roles instead of one.
Well, in my view, the author might have unfairly characterized all arts as having too much in common with each other. I know nothing about filming. Before I became a professional writer (for a company, not actually writing books), I was an aspiring musician and, let me tell you, what he says is very accurate for this 'career'.
All the bands (or 'projects' as we liked to call them) I've ever been in (more than 10 in the last 15 or so years) thought we could have made it; 'making it' meaning having monetary success or 'living off of music'. All of us failed except one of my ex-band members.
The problem is, as the author suggests, it's not really about skill, though there is a level of skill needed to be successful. That level is very low, though, whereas in other professions that skill level might mean a 30, 40 or 50k salary difference.
As a child, I thought playing music was about skill, so I learned classical guitar, and, according to my friends, I was the 'best guitar player they knew'. I always got compliments at shows and on my own albums. I was never even close to being found out by an A&R guy or signed to a record label. And guess what? There are a lot of people like me. 10 years ago I got really into jazz and that was my new circle or 'thing'. I came at music more from a jazz perspective because I knew theory and deconstructed tunes (in all styles) whereas rock musicians don't really like to do that and many of them can't. I remember going to the jazz festival and talking to musicians telling me how 'Yah, we're signed, but we don't even get a free copy of our album. We have to pay for it like everybody else'. These local musicians are successful because they live off their music, but many of them have modest earnings that pay the bills. They can't afford vacationing every year to somewhere fancy and most have beat-up cars, maybe a wife, and no more than one child, if that. They are very humble people.
(And yet, and yet) you have people that can hardly sing a note that are famous where their work is based on great post-production sound engineers. It's easy to be bitter about the music industry, but a lot of them aren't. I know I'm not and I listen to Justin Bieber without a problem (though my friends and family think it is very bizarre of me to).
The way you reach monetary/economic success as a musician is usually about non-music-related stuff you do, which is strange because in most professions, the way you become successful is by practicing your art and honing your skills.
My only friend (my ex-band mate) that is 'successful' tours the world and lives off music, but he barely breaks even, since they have to pay for studio costs, equipment costs, accommodation, car/transportation costs, roadies, etc. He loves it, but he says it is extremely difficult and gets depressed easily. This particular friend knows his limited skills so he goes more for showmanship and energy and getting people pumped - he plays garage rock. The funny (interesting) thing is his band was about to disband when all of a sudden the right A&R guy discovered them. It took probably 4 years of touring the country (Canada) and some parts of the States all on their own expense while having full-time jobs and doing it on their vacation time. Thousands of dollars. He was doing it while we were in a band together and with our band we burnt over 10k of our own money in only a year and a half.
Now when I hear him on the radio I love it. I'm so proud of him (and I can picture everyone laughing at me for being such a nerd). But there is a huge element of luck and he knows it. You work hard and don't expect to make it, yet you put yourself through it because you love your art, your music. And you do this for decades.
> The way you reach monetary/economic success as a musician is usually about non-music-related stuff you do, which is strange because in most professions, the way you become successful is by practicing your art and honing your skills.
Seems like this is actually common to every profession where other people matter to your success... which is almost every profession. On HN, one usually hears this same idea framed as coding/design/product versus business/selling/marketing. I think people in most lines of work would agree that as long as you are not incompetent it is personal relationships, image, persuasion, and all of those 'soft' skills that that matter more to (financial) success than technical skill.
The fact is that pretty much every successful novelist, every successful pop star, every successful artist is successful mainly because of luck. Oftentimes there’s skill involved too, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers as you do in the tiny set of people who make it huge.
There are a few things I find very wrong with this paragraph:
1) The definition of success. Even under the assumption of monetary gain, this just isn't a good statement. Success, for an artist can be measured in many other ways. That aside: plenty of successful actors got to where they were because they tried harder than others. They showed up to more auditions than others. They worked hard training themselves in schools or other avenues. They were simply better at the profession with a greater understanding of how to get hired. This brings me to my next point.
2) Just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers.
This statement is just not true. You will only find handfuls of people that are capable of pulling off, even basic, performances necessary for a professional venue. They are the exceptions and they are skilled and talented. They get work because of this uniqueness. They don't appear in shows over and over again because they are lucky, they appear because they present artistic, or even monetary, value to the production.
I appreciated and enjoyed reading the article but the definitive nature of the statements from the author regarding "pretty much every" successful artist didn't sit well with me.
For the reasons that the author illustrated earlier in the article, yes people do get lucky. But I don't think the conclusions are appropriate to apply to the skillsets of artists in this way.
Artists can, and do, achieve successes on their own accord without lady luck. Sure, luck is helpful but for every 1 successful Hollywood star, there are scores of other successful artists working because they are simply better and more talented. You may never see these people on the silver screen. They are successful; in their own minds, and the minds of artists. All of this without regard to an agreed upon definition of success.