Being good – excellent, even – is no guarantee that a talent will be rewarded with success, writes Duncan J. Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in a guest editorial for Bloomberg.
As a case study, Watts uses the recent revelation that bestselling Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling wrote a well-received but sparsely selling (sparsely selling before the reveal, that is) mystery novel under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The assumption is that if Rowling could impress critics without “the benefit of her towering reputation,” then surely her success is deserved.
“And yet what this episode actually reveals is the opposite: that Rowling’s spectacular career is likely more a fluke of history than a consequence of her unique genius,” Watts writes.
He goes on to discuss an experiment he conducted with colleagues at Columbia University where they set out to prove that market success is driven less by intrinsic talent than by “cumulative advantage.” The team recruited nearly 30,000 people to listen to, rate, and download songs by bands they’d never heard of as part of the experiment.
“What Rowling’s little experiment has actually demonstrated, however, is that quality and success are even more unrelated than we found in our experiment. It might be hard for a book to become a runaway bestseller if it’s unreadably bad (although one might argue that the Twilight series and “Fifty Shades of Grey” challenge this constraint), but it is also clear that being good, or even excellent, isn’t enough,” Watts writes.
Read the full, though-provoking article on the correlation between talent and fame at Bloomberg.
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Jennifer Warnick
Microsoft News Center Staff