A book I picked up recently is Seth Godin’s ‘The Dip’. If you don’t know Godin he’s a bit of a god in marketing circles (boom boom) and writes a lot of clever books that are getting shorter and shorter and better and better. His books are mostly about current marketing tropes, and it would be fair to say that he has invented a fair few of them. But ‘The Dip’ is a little different.
It’s about how much effort you are prepared to put in to make it through the bit where nothing happens (the dip) and how the system is stacked against you to *preserve* scarcity. In his view talent is not scarce but determination and smarts are.
This is the natural pair of the ‘long tail’ theory: Yes there is lots of money in selling long-tail niche-market books, but it’s no fun being a long-tail writer, actor or other creative. So Godin talks about the ‘fat head’ - though that’s my phrase - where the top 10 percent take 90 percent of the action. So one way or another if you want to make it you have to make it through the dip and jump the hurdles: The hurdles might not be fair and they might be very very intimidating, but they are there to keep you out until you can demonstrate that you are worthy of entry.
This is kinda depressing but at the same time I can see the logic. I worked out many years ago in my acting days that talent is often the smaller part of someones’ success. I am a talented actor but I wouldn’t say that I was very successful, and looking back I can clearly see it’s because I just didn’t want to do the work that would have made me so. And this work wasn’t vocal exercises and impro classes, this work was making shows yourself and doing the self-promotion needed to reach the top layer. This was in NZ where the acting community is tiny and the actual effort required to do the work minimal. Basically I was lazy and expecting success to come to me because people would JUST SEE that I was brilliant. This is a teenagers view of the world, another version of the ‘if I wear black and have an asymmetric fringe people will JUST SEE how cool I am’. Now I am very much in favour of wearing black and asymetric haircuts, but now I realise it’s not an achievement, it’s just a haircut.
So the people already on the inside of the hurdles have a vested interest in keeping the hurdles there, because they are already STARS and want to maintain the star system. This applies to any field of endeavour worth doing and many that aren’t. The Bar is one version, the long and horrible path to being a doctor is another. Sometimes they are explicit like Medical exams, and sometimes implicit like the years and years you must spend lifting a movie camera, then the years spent being the focus puller before you get anywhere near becoming a Director of Photography. But once you are a DOP you are a STAR.
As for ‘overnight discoveries’? Most of the time they are more like announcements that someone has jumped over the bar and most of the time they have been working through the Dip for years and years. Why do you think most people making a living in the UK from ScriptWriting are in their 40s or later? Because it takes a long time to take your talent and make it work for the industry, so stop doing some sophisticated form of the JUST SEE and actually engage with your talent, the market and solve the ‘how do I get through the dip?’ problem.
Is this fair? Maybe not. It’s not egalitarian, it’s not friendly, but it’s there. So what are you going to do about it?
Godin has some more to say about that, all I’ll get to those things tomorrow…
