What the Mona Lisa teaches us about success
You’ve probably heard of a little painting called the Mona Lisa. This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, painted by Leonardo da Vinci. This painting is so valuable that it’s insured for nearly $700 million. The Louvre in Paris estimates that 80 percent of its six million visitors each year primarily come to see it. Why do people travel from all over the world to come and see it? Well, they come to see it because it’s one of the best paintings of all time, right?
What if I told you that the entire reason the Mona Lisa is famous is out of pure randomness? I’ll explain why, but don’t tell the people who believe it’s just a superior painting to others. The dissonance will set in, and it ain’t pretty.
I regularly think about how many voices will never be heard. How many experiences will we never know about? How many issues will never even come across our radar? It’s not just that, either. This involves people who will never have the opportunity to work their way up in a field and possibly change the world for the better.
It’s impossible to know just how many people will never succeed, and you may be one of them. Whether you’re trying to get into a specific college, climb the ladder in a career, become a writer or a YouTuber, there’s a good chance it’ll never happen.
Today, I wanted to discuss why.
If you’re a consumer, you can just sit back and relax. If you like to consume content or just don’t want the hassle and responsibilities that come with being in charge, you’re good. That’s totally fine, too. It’s actually kind of ridiculous how people are shamed for just wanting to get by.
Now, if you’re someone who has something to say or has certain goals, I’m going to tell you a lot of stuff you don’t want to hear. If that’s the case, you may want to leave now. But, if you can handle it, I promise that I’ll leave you with some hope at the end as well as some proven strategies to make things happen for yourself.
This is neither meant to bring you down or hype you up with that “you can do anything” over-the-top self-help nonsense.
All of us are being gaslit. Personally, it took me a long time to figure this out. I felt like I was the problem for most of my life because I couldn’t catch a break. Once I started diving into books and research, things started making more sense.
We’re made to believe that if we’re not succeeding, we must be doing something wrong. In this neoliberal, individualistic society, you’re told that if you work hard and don’t give up, you will succeed.
This is beyond easy to falsify, but many of us just never question it. All you have to do is ask yourself one simple question: Is there anyone who has worked hard and done everything right but didn’t succeed or reach their goal?
Of course. We see these people all around us. In fact, you may be one of them. So, I’m writing this in hopes to help you realize that there’s a lot of gaslighting going on, and you may not be doing anything wrong.
This is why so many spiritual and pseudoscientific spiritual woo-woo practices are so toxic.
Not to knock religion, but believers are told that if they don’t succeed, they didn’t pray hard enough, it’s not in God’s plan, or maybe they just pissed God off. Those who buy into the law of attraction and similar nonsense are told that if they don’t have good outcomes, they just weren’t doing it right. They weren’t staying positive enough.
Can you imagine a writer who spends years honing their skills and sending their manuscript to 100 publishers only to be shut down being told they just weren’t staying positive? What about someone who loses their job, and after applying to dozens of places with no luck due to the economy, they’re told that they aren’t working hard enough?
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to explain why it’s so difficult to succeed by using creatives as an example. These same concepts apply for everything from applying for colleges and careers, so keep that in mind. But, we can all relate to wanting to be heard and seen, and that’s exactly what creatives are trying to do with their work.
Although I said that if you’re a consumer of content, you can sit back and relax, that’s not entirely true because you’re an important piece of this puzzle. For each voice we’ll never hear, you’re the ones who can change all that by consuming it and spreading the word by those who have something to say.
Why this is hard to hear
If you haven’t left yet, this might do it for you. How many people want to hear they aren’t in control of their future or their success? Nobody. That’s who.
Humans are control freaks, and we’d rather live in the delusion that we’re in control of outcomes than even consider the alternative. This is one of those “useful delusions”. The belief that we’re not in control can drive us insane, and it’s often a symptom of depression. But, it’s also something that’s causing a lot of harm.
There’s actually a nice body of research around something called “depressive realism”. Depressive realism is a depressed person’s ability to actually see the world in a much more real way than those who are functioning “normally”. We’re all victims of the optimism bias, which is thinking that we’re going to have fantastic outcomes because we’re in control by putting in the work.
People with depression learn how to live with this and have to learn how to lie to themselves just to move forward. But those who aren’t seeing the world and outcomes for what they are will ultimately struggle quite a bit as well.
When we don’t recognize that hard work doesn’t always equate to success, we look for someone to blame, and that person is usually ourselves.
Again, even though this is a tough pill to swallow, it’s easy to see. How many times have you put in the work and not received the results? What’s worse is when you have people in your life who are trying to find flaws in your work because they want to feel in control as well. To tell recognize that you did everything right but didn’t get the results would mean that this world is not what we’d considered “fair”.
What’s interesting is that we have an entire fallacy that was named for this type of thinking. Many of us even know of this fallacy, yet we use it all the time while we explain away what’s actually going on. This fallacy is known as the “just world fallacy”.
The just world fallacy is the belief that the world is just and that every outcome happened for a very good reason. This is why so many people blame victims. It’s much easier to tell a woman that what happened to her was because of what she was wearing rather than believe that something terrible could happen to someone who didn’t “deserve” it.
Welcome to randomness
The reality is that the Mona Lisa sat for literally hundreds of years without many people knowing or caring about it. Leonardo da Vinci painted this thing in 1503, and it was just another decent painting until the 20th century.
Here’s what happened.
Back in 1911, this disgruntled employee at the Louvre by the name of Vincenzo Peruggia hid in the museum until closing and walked out with the Mona Lisa in his coat. Since da Vinci was Italian, Peruggia believed the painting should be in Italy and not France. The painting was just chilling in this guy’s apartment for two years until he was caught and arrested when trying to sell it.
Much like the Kardashians, the Mona Lisa then became famous just for being famous. Like many other viral stories that we see on social media, this story just randomly spread like wildfire. The French thought the story was crazy because it was so easy for some random employee to steal a piece of art like this. The Italians loved this guy Vincent’s patriotism. This led to the story blowing up in these two countries getting the painting even more attention.
After that, there were two more instances of people up to no good involving this painting. One vandal threw acid on it, and then this other guy threw a rock at it. This gave the painting even more attention.
From there, the rest was history. People started making parodies of the painting like Marcel Duchamp in 1919 by recreating it with a mustache and goatee. Years later, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali made their own versions of the Mona Lisa as well.
The Mona Lisa just happened to be a painting that got caught up in a viral moment with the right people bringing more attention to it throughout the years. But, if you were to ask most of the people about this painting today, they’d just tell you they like it because it’s just so well done.
Now, this isn’t to say the Mona Lisa isn’t an excellent painting, because it definitely is. But this story is important for creatives because this type of thing is far more common than you may think. Whether it’s a painting, piece of writing, or a piece of YouTube content, it’s a matter of the right place, right time, and the right people talking about it.
The story we tell ourselves about success is wrong, especially when it comes to the subjectivity of what people create. So, if you wrote something, filmed something, or drew something that nobody cared about, it may not have been due to anything that you did wrong. Sometimes, what gets attention is just a result of randomness.
Meet my friend Matthew
Art is subjective. Yes, there are definitely technical aspects involved, but at a certain point, it comes down to personal taste. Aside from personal taste, the success or failure of something creative really boils down to human behavior. What people talk about is baked into how we evolved, and nothing shows this better than an experiment conducted by Duncan Watts and his colleagues.
One of my favorite books of all time is Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer, by Duncan Watts. In fact, that entire Mona Lisa I just told you was based on Watts’ book because that’s where I first learned about it. So, do yourself a favor and read it.
Duncan Watts and his fellow researchers wanted to see what made a song popular and if those results could be manipulated. To do this, they created a music player app similar to Spotify and gave research participants a playlist of unknown bands of a similar genre and had them rate the bands from best to worst. During the first round of the research, the results were all over the place. No band was consistently the best band.
The second group of participants is where things get interesting.
This time, much like Spotify, they added one more piece of information: how many downloads each song had. This number was completely fabricated, and each person would see a different number of downloads for the same songs. So, if a song showed as number one on your screen, it may be last on someone else’s.
What they found was that most people rated songs higher that already had a bunch of downloads.
It makes sense when you think about it. Why would so many people listen to this song if it was bad? Well, that’s actually another fallacy, and it’s called the appeal to popularity. This fallacy uses false logic because something being popular or widely believed doesn’t make it good or correct. Think about how many people believe in the same baseless conspiracy theories. Having a lot of people believe the same wrong thing doesn’t make it right.
People assume something is better just because a lot of people like it. This is a heuristic we use because it doesn’t take nearly as much brain power as trying to judge something on our own. I know we all love to believe we’re independent thinkers and just like things because we like them, but that’s not how this works. That’s the same thing the millions of people seeing the Mona Lisa believe.
Think about what this means if you’re someone who creates things.
Sure, unknown people can become successful, but due to how we judge things based on how much they’re already liked, it’s much more difficult to make this happen. How many times have you watched or read something and thought, “Why do so many people like this? It’s mediocre at best.” Sometimes, you’re one of the only people seeing that the emperor has no clothes.
Once something is popular, it benefits from something known as The Matthew Effect. The Matthew Effect is named after Matthew 25:29:
“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
Basically, what’s popular just gets more popular. Meanwhile, something that’s unknown is going to have an even harder time breaking through.
The problem with the Matthew Effect is that it leaves no room for new voices, and this was so apparent to me while I was focusing on my podcast. I never really listened to podcasts before, but I started listening so I could learn. I started realizing that the people who were interviewed would be everywhere.
Once I got my podcast going, I realized that having a huge author on didn’t mean my podcast would blow up. Why? Think about it. Even if that author shares it with their tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers, that doesn’t mean much because they’re on a ton of podcasts. Why is mine different?
But it wasn’t about me, I started noticing this with writing and the stories we hear about. When a story goes viral, everyone starts covering it. All of the news outlets and publications are talking about it. Much like the person being interviewed, you’re just seeing the same stories from different outlets.
During this time, there’s an infinite amount of stories we never even hear about. Similarly, we’re not getting any new opinions because the places publishing the stories have benefited from the Matthew Effect as well. There are smaller writers and journalists out there who actually have something unique to say about the story or want to share a story of equal importance, but we never even know they exist.
Social signaling isn’t working in your favor
Everything we do is a way to signal to others who we are and what we’re about. Those clothes you’re wearing are a sign to the world what your style is, and that says something about you. For example, I have a very laid-back style and like goofy stuff. Today, I’m wearing a shirt of a cat in an astronaut helmet. People can infer that I like cats and silly stuff. If I was standing next to someone in a suit and tie, you’d have some ideas about the type of person they are, too.
Well, it’s not just about what we wear, it’s also about what we consume. In her book The Sum of Small Things, sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett calls this “inconspicuous consumption”. What we consume says something about us in the same way our clothes do.
Similar to a guy in an expensive suit standing next to me in my astronaut cat shirt, we can see that with art. The person who says that their favorite painting of all time is the Mona Lisa is saying something much different than the person whose favorite artwork comes from the anonymous street artist Banksy.
We use this social signaling as a sort of social currency. We gain points with others when we show our excellent taste. Once we share it, then they can do the same and hopefully gain the same social points as us.
Now, think about it. Since the Matthew Effect kicks in with something someone creates, the people who like that thing are saying something. If you’re a small, unknown person, what is that saying to people? Not much. Why would they share it? If they don’t know what you’re talking about, then why would others?
There are caveats to this, of course. If you happen to share something extremely interesting from an unknown source, it has better chances. But, as things get larger, the quality can decrease drastically. The top writers or YouTubers in the world don’t even have to say anything new to get eyeballs. They’re benefiting from the fact that they’re already big and people can gain social points by sharing the content.
Finally, we need to understand how algorithms make all of this much worse for voices that aren’t being heard. All social media algorithms have one goal and one goal only: keep people on the platform.
Social media platforms amplify the Matthew Effect that’s being fed by social signaling. When algorithms see things being shared, regardless of quality or accuracy, the algorithms promote the content to more people.
But half the problem is just human nature. Imagine a YouTube home page that actually showed you some videos with fewer views. And I mean like, barely any views at all or maybe even none. Think about Duncan Watts’ music experiment as you imagine this scenario.
I just opened an incognito window for YouTube and here are the top 8 videos it showed me.
What do you think would happen if one of those videos had 10 views? How many people would click it? What if it had 100 views? How about 1,000 views?
Any video with that few views on a homepage like this would look extremely out of place. Sure, thumbnails and titles are extremely important on a platform like YouTube, but with the exceptions of Mr. Beast and LazarBeam (maybe Alex Meyers), they’re all pretty basic. Most of them, including Alex Meyers’, is either a screenshot or just a little more than a screenshot.
As I mentioned, I love cats, but the video “Cute Animals for when You are Stressed” has 25 million views, and it’s just a picture of a cat. If you put a thumbnail of equal cuteness and a similar title next to it that didn’t have many views, the small one would fail based on human behavior.
With social media algorithms, the Matthew Effect hurts smaller content even more as well. What happens is that even when YouTube decides to toss a smaller video up, if people don’t click it, the algorithm just stops sharing it.
That’s right. Due to absolutely no fault of the creator, something can just die off because people chose to click on videos that had more views already.
What’s the solution?
If you made it this far without screaming at your screen, congratulations. You did it. You’ve left Socrates’ cave and are no longer just looking at the shadows on the wall. Now we can discuss solutions.
As you learned, the Mona Lisa became famous because more people just started talking about it, and it just grew in popularity from there. This is something that a group of artists were actually able to manufacture much like Duncan Watts’ experiment, and there’s a lot that we can learn from it.
A group of artists who were dedicated to becoming famous decided to work together and make it happen. What they did was decide that they were going to work their butts off, but they were also going to submit their work to every gallery possible. They did this for a time, and it worked. All it took was getting in the right gallery one time, and their work started to take off for a few reasons.
Different art galleries carry different prestige. Getting featured in a low-tier gallery is nothing special, but if just one high-tier gallery accepts your work, you’re golden. This happens due to the social currency people want. Although these small artists didn’t have a name that carried any weight, the gallery did. People who visited the gallery, as a way to show off, told others about what they saw at the gallery, so the word started to spread.
The other benefits came from just being featured in the gallery. When an artist is featured in a top-tier gallery, submitting to other galleries is much easier. All the artists had to do was tell others where their art was featured, and other larger galleries took that as a sign that their art was good. Why else would one of these top-tier galleries feature their work?
After that, the artists then have not one, but two top-tier galleries on their resume. When they go to the next top-tier gallery, they know that there’s no way those two galleries don’t know what they’re doing, so the third accepts the work as well.
Are you starting to see how the Matthew Effect kicks in?
People often asked me how I landed so many big authors on my podcast, and this the exact process I followed. First, I played the numbers game. I reached out to as many authors as possible and had most of the large authors turn me down, but it only took a few to say yes. After that, other big authors were able to see who I’ve had on, and they figured my podcast must be good enough for them as well.
When people ask me how I managed to grow my YouTube channel to 100k subscribers in a year, it was the same thing. I played the numbers game. Each piece of content was an opportunity for something to get picked up by the algorithm. Some channels only have 100 videos after five years. Some have even less. Within my first couple of years on the platform, I had over 1,000 videos.
I didn’t have nearly as many hits as you’d think, and this is what really got me interested in this topic. I watched videos flop that were of the exact same quality as videos that got hundreds of thousands of views.
If you need more evidence that quality is subjective and people share to social signal, just check Twitter. Scroll through your feed for a few minutes, and I guaranteed you’ll see someone with a massive following who has tweeted nothing special, but it has an insane amount of likes and retweets.
So, if you’re a creative, don’t stop creating. I’m still nothing special myself, but I just enjoy creating stuff. I have to remind myself of everything we discussed today when I’m feeling down or beating myself up when something flops. While we should always find room for improvement, we also need to cut ourselves a little slack. Because as you can see, there’s a lot that’s outside of our control.
The craziest part about all of this is that I barely even scratched the surface. There are so many other factors that come into play. Especially when it comes to human behavior.
Aside from just putting in the work and getting it out there as much as possible, it’s also important that all of us who consume content share it. Even if you’re not a creative, if you stumble across something, share it. It’s a challenge to catch yourself and realize that you weren’t going to share something because it wasn’t going to get you any social points. But when you do, share that thing anyway.
I’m actually pretty happy to see how many YouTubers and writers I follow who share content of others regardless of size. It gives me some hope.
So, just remember that even though success is often outside of your control, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. More importantly, it doesn’t mean that you should stop creating or getting your voice heard. If you have something important to say, get it out there and see what happens.
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