Derek Thompson > Quotes

“To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular

“People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“The mark of a good book is that you're happy to come home to it. The mark of a great book is that you occasionally schedule your life to stay home with it.”
― Derek Thompson

“Quality, it seems, is a necessary, but insufficient attribute for success.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is an hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction of fiction, is an “invitation to daydream.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“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.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought, to the object of their thinking.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“Some consumers buy products not because they are ‘better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular

“Initially [my favorite books] 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.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.”
― Derek Thompson

“People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“The mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles a virus. Popularity on the internet is driven by the size of the largest broadcast. Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“It begs for a gospel of perseverance through inevitable failure... There is no antidote to the chaos of creative markets. Only the brute doggedness to endure it.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“This long-tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“Almost every piece of media people consume, every purchase they make, every design they confront lives on a continuum between fluency and disfluency - ease of thinking and difficulty of thinking. Most people lead lives of quiet fluency. They listen to music that sounds like the music they've already heard. They look forward to movies with characters, actors, and plot that they recognize. they don't heed ideas from opposing parties, particularly if these ideas seem painfully complicated. (...) the greatest joys often come from discovering fluency in places you didn't expect.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“Imitating recent successes is a game that everybody knows how to play. But seeing the next big thing before anybody else sees it is far more valuable... It means being a little bit wrong at just the right time.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“The consumer is influenced in his choice of styling by two opposing factors: (a) attraction to the new and (b) resistance to the unfamiliar,” he wrote. “When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“You take twenty-five things that are in any successful genre, and you reverse one of them,” he said. “Reverse too many, and you get genre confusion. It’s a muddle, and nobody knows how to place it. Invert all the elements, and it’s a parody.” But one strategic tweak? Now you’ve made something that is perfectly new, like a classic western adventure story, but set in space.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

“First, understand how people behave; second, build products that match their habits.”
― Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

“It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature.”
― Derek Thompson

“But our desks were never meant to be our altars.”
― Derek Thompson