Derek Thompson

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

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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