Derek Thompson Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles a virus. Popularity on the internet is driven by the size of the largest broadcast. Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments.

The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.

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.

The mark of a good book is that you're happy to come home to it. The mark of a great book is that you occasionally schedule your life to stay home with it.

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

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.

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?

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