Best 24 quotes of Derek Thompson on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong

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.

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.

People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.

People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.

Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.

Quality, it seems, is a necessary, but insufficient attribute for success.

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.

...successful creations grow most predictably when they tap into a small network of people who do not see themselves as mainstream, but rather bound by an idea or commonality that they consider special. People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.

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.

The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.

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.

This long-tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

This might be the most important question for every creator and maker in the world: how do you make something new if most people just like what they know? Is it possible to surprise with familiarity?

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

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

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.

When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought, to the object of their thinking.