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I have a tenuous relationship with success. I’ve tasted it, even wallowed in it on occasion. I have embraced what I thought was success, but was only False Hope. Like many of you, I have experienced a Momentary Surge in Fortune, followed by a Disastrous Fall to Earth. I’ve been seduced and abandoned by the Fickle Goddess Fame, driven to heights of euphoria by Self-Delusion, and wrestled to the ground by the dread Dwindling Bank Account.
Through it all, I’ve kept my chin up, making it easier for the world to land another punch, if nothing else. I keep hoping that one day I’ll discover the business model for satire.
Once this happens, I’ll not only be able to retire on my stock options, but I’ll also make it possible for thousands, if not billions, of wiseacres to retire as well, to mutter at their television screens in safety and security.
But what is success? How does it happen?
As part of my ongoing research, I’ve been reading Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 (Simon & Schuster, 1999) by former Newsweek pop music critic James Miller. In this alarming history of rock and roll, he writes about a meeting “in an empty bar” in the very early 1950s.
Todd Storz and Bill Stewart had been struggling to lift an Omaha, Nebraska radio station from its last place ranking. One night, they were drinking in an Omaha bar, listening to the jukebox, when “Storz was struck by a paradox.”
“While in the army during the war,” Miller writes, “he had noticed that soldiers took pleasure in hearing the same songs played over and over again.”
The two had a brainstorm: “Why not play records…in the same way that patrons were playing them on the jukebox —over and over again?” KOWH went to number one in less than a year, and Top 40 radio was born.
“Recipe for success,” I wrote in my notebook, “Repetition.”
Is there more to success than that? Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown & Company, 2000) addresses this issue.
I didn’t read the book (Do you think I have nothing better to do than ponder critical tomes all day?), but I read a couple of reviews.
What is a “tipping point”? In the ‘50s, sociologist Morton Grodzins first coined the term to describe what percentage of a minority group was needed to enter a neighborhood before the white majority will leave.
Gladwell appropriated the term to explain why Hush Puppies suddenly became popular, why the crime rate in New York suddenly dropped, and why “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” caught on. He calls these cultural phenomena “social epidemics.”
A small group of people spreads the phenomena like viruses (according to the theory). What helps spread the epidemic is “stickiness,” a concept familiar to Web workers. It’s that ineffable quality that makes people want to be around your product. Nickelodeon’s “Blues Clues,” according to a review of The Tipping Point (The New Republic, March 13, 2000), succeeded because: “It lacks the cleverness and wordplay of “Sesame Street”; it is less cluttered; it involves a great deal of repetition (children like repetition).”
I wrote in my notebook: “Repetition is recipe for success.”
Then I turned to an article in the New York Times (March 7, 2000) about a team of American, Romanian, and Hungarian researchers. They were studying why rhythmic clapping occurs at a public event and at what point it breaks down.
“A rhythm breaks down, the researchers theorized, because…synchronized clapping…is not particularly noisy — there are fewer claps in a given time period because the audience has slowed down. So enthusiastic members of the audience start to clap faster to raise the noise level…destroying the conditions for synchronization.”
One of the Romanian researchers, Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barnabasi, an associate professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, “suggested that this was precisely what happened during speeches by totalitarian Eastern European leaders. They were met with prolonged, rhythmic applause, but seldom enough enthusiasm to create chaos.”
Wow. Repetition is a precondition for totalitarianism? On the other hand, I certainly don’t want to create chaos. I wrote in my notebook: “The line between success and brainwashing is thin. Which side am I on?”
Ian Shoales has come to believe that repetition is important for success. He lives in San Francisco. He lives in San Francisco.
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