The secret to success in the arts

tl;dr: Be lucky

Before adopting programming as my job and passion, I was a professional actor and I plan on continuing to act professionally when I move back to to a place where it is more avaialble. Working professionally in many capacities for many years, I can tell you that luck certainly helps, for some people. This author completely discounts artists who trained, worked and pushed themselves for years and years to get where they are: regularly hired for awesome roles, being paid well, and doing it professionally day after day for their livelihood.

The fact is that pretty much every successful novelist, every successful pop star, every successful artist is successful mainly because of luck. Oftentimes there’s skill involved too, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers as you do in the tiny set of people who make it huge.

There are a few things I find very wrong with this paragraph:

1) The definition of success. Even under the assumption of monetary gain, this just isn't a good statement. Success, for an artist can be measured in many other ways. That aside: plenty of successful actors got to where they were because they tried harder than others. They showed up to more auditions than others. They worked hard training themselves in schools or other avenues. They were simply better at the profession with a greater understanding of how to get hired. This brings me to my next point.

2) Just as much skill in the millions of unsuccessful strivers.

This statement is just not true. You will only find handfuls of people that are capable of pulling off, even basic, performances necessary for a professional venue. They are the exceptions and they are skilled and talented. They get work because of this uniqueness. They don't appear in shows over and over again because they are lucky, they appear because they present artistic, or even monetary, value to the production.

I appreciated and enjoyed reading the article but the definitive nature of the statements from the author regarding "pretty much every" successful artist didn't sit well with me.

For the reasons that the author illustrated earlier in the article, yes people do get lucky. But I don't think the conclusions are appropriate to apply to the skillsets of artists in this way.

Artists can, and do, achieve successes on their own accord without lady luck. Sure, luck is helpful but for every 1 successful Hollywood star, there are scores of other successful artists working because they are simply better and more talented. You may never see these people on the silver screen. They are successful; in their own minds, and the minds of artists. All of this without regard to an agreed upon definition of success.

The outlier theory didn't 'make' anyone rich, it just explains why some outliers got rich and why other outlier events lead to the crash.

Taleb doesn't advocate backing low probability outcomes, because he can't predict which of them will occur any more than anyone else. That's a fundamental misreading of his approach. All he's saying is that some of those low probability events are going to happen, and you need to develop strategies that are survivable given low probability events. Strategies that assume no low probability events will (ever) happen are doomed.

The problem is, and he's very much aware of this, that strategies that are survivable against many low probability events are never optimal for the actual way events play out. The question then is what degree of non-optimisation (risk protection) are you willing to tolerate. A single trader might tolerate extreme risk for short periods of time. Too big to fail institutions should tolerate very low risks. Taleb is arguing for more realistic and practical ways to calculate and account for risks.

I'm a professional film director. I also agree 100% with this statement.

There is a huge variance in skill in all the creative professions.

I've had the opportunity to work with some extremely well-known actors. Within five minutes of starting working with them, it was obvious why they were so well-known - their skill at the craft was, to a man/woman, extraordinary.

That's something I've found to be the case in other contractors on films, too. Most of the time, in my experience, the 3D artists who get the top jobs or command the highest contracting fees are the most skilled and the easiest to work with, for example.

If you want a really good basic guide to success in the creative arts, I recommend Neil Gaiman's University of the Arts speech:

http://vimeo.com/42372767

Salmon's point isn't that there is no variance in creative skill, it's just that there isn't enough to matter in the scheme of being "the best in the world". There's not nearly enough variance to compensate for the luck required to be in the top 100 out of several million.

What you're describing is a "3-sigma" difference, but to be an A-list Hollywood star you'd need to be in something like the 50th sigma. That just isn't explainable by skill.