Derek Thompson Quotes

#1. 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.

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

#5. 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.

Derek Thompson

#6. 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.

Derek Thompson

#7. 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?

Derek Thompson

#8. It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

#10. To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

Derek Thompson

#11. 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.

Derek Thompson

#12. 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.

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

#15. 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.

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

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

Derek Thompson

#18. 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.

Derek Thompson

#19. 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.

Derek Thompson

#20. 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.

Derek Thompson

#21. 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.

Derek Thompson