Full transcript
0:00In a study of what makes some comic book
0:02creators more likely to produce
0:04blockbusters, researchers tracked
0:06creators across 234 different
0:08publishers, and they looked at
0:10everything that you might think matters.
0:12The years of experience in the field,
0:14the resources of the publisher, even the
0:16number of previous comics that a creator
0:19had made. None of that predicted who was
0:21most likely to have a hit. High
0:23repetition, doing a lot of the same kind
0:25of comic over and over, actually had a
0:27negative association with creative
0:29performance. The single biggest
0:30predictor of who would produce a
0:31blockbuster comic was the number of
0:34different genres that a creator [music]
0:36had worked across. The more genres a
0:38creator had touched, the better their
0:40odds of producing something truly
0:43original. And here's the part that
0:45really surprised me. Teams of
0:47specialists were good, but individual
0:49creators who worked across four or more
0:51genres outperformed entire teams of
0:54specialists. So, a broad individual
0:57couldn't just be replaced by a team of
0:59specialists from different areas. The
1:01study's title gives it away: Superman or
1:04The Fantastic Four. The answer was both
1:08are good, but Superman is better. One
1:10person with range [music] was more
1:12creatively powerful than a group of
1:14narrow experts who were combined. Now,
1:17I've spent years researching this
1:19pattern for my book Range, and across
1:21hundreds of studies in science, sports,
1:24music, and business, the comic book
1:26finding is not an isolated result. It's
1:28really the tip of a much larger body of
1:30evidence about where creative
1:32breakthroughs come from, and why the
1:35most impactful creatives often look
1:38nothing like the specialists that we're
1:40told we should become. So, we probably
1:43don't produce as many of these people as
1:44we could, because early on, frankly,
1:47they just look like they're behind. And
1:49we don't tend to incentivize anything
1:50that doesn't look like a head start or
1:52specialization. Let me tell you about
1:54two musicians who came up in the same
1:56place at the same time, but ended up in
1:59completely different places. It's the
2:01late 1960s and early 70s. The London
2:03rock scene is exploding and two young
2:06artists are right in the thick of it.
2:08Peter Frampton and David Bowie.
2:11Frampton found his lane early. He was a
2:13guitar prodigy. He was a teen heartthrob
2:15and by 1976 he'd released Frampton Comes
2:18Alive, one of the best-selling live
2:20albums in history. It was a defining
2:22moment in arena rock.
2:24>> [music]
2:24>> It was massive, immediate and undeniable
2:27success.
2:28And then creatively he kind of
2:30disappeared. He kept making records, but
2:33the cultural moment passed and he didn't
2:35really have anything new to offer to
2:37meet the changing moment. He'd built his
2:39career on one mode and when that mode
2:41stopped resonating with people there was
2:43nowhere else for him to go.
2:45Bowie, meanwhile, was a commercial mess
2:48early on.
2:49He was doing folk songs and novelty pop,
2:51glam, soul, electronic, ambient, art
2:54rock.
2:55He was constantly reinventing [music]
2:57himself and kind of confusing audiences,
2:59frankly. Fans he'd gained with one
3:01identity might be alienated by the next.
3:03By any short-term measure it basically
3:06looked like career sabotage, but that
3:08genre hopping is exactly what gave him a
3:1140-plus year career of creative
3:13relevance.
3:14Ziggy Stardust, Low, Let's Dance, his
3:18work with Brian Eno, the Tin Machine
3:20detour that everyone hated at the time,
3:22and then a late career renaissance with
3:25Blackstar, released two days before his
3:28death that critics called a masterpiece.
3:30Frampton peaked once and then he faded.
3:33Bowie never stopped evolving.
3:35So, what explains the difference? Justin
3:38Berg, a researcher at Stanford who
3:40studies organizational behavior, became
3:42fascinated by this exact question. Why
3:45are some creators shooting stars that
3:47burn out quickly while others are able
3:49to sustain success over decades?
3:52So, he ran a massive study analyzing
3:54nearly 70,000 artists and 3 million
3:57songs, tracking who had zero hits,
4:00[music] who was a one-hit wonder,
4:02and who managed to produce hit after hit
4:04over time. [music]
4:05And he found two key dimensions that
4:07predicted sustained creative success:
4:10[music] novelty
4:12and variety.
4:13Here's the cruel irony he uncovered.
4:16Novelty in your early work is actually a
4:18negative predictor of initial success.
4:21If your early stuff is weird and
4:23different from what's popular at the
4:24time, you're less likely to get your
4:27first hit.
4:28But, and this is the critical part, if
4:30you do manage to break through with a
4:32novel portfolio,
4:34that same novelty becomes the engine of
4:36sustained success. It makes you more
4:38adaptable,
4:40gives you more to draw from, and it
4:41teaches you more than a conventional
4:43portfolio really ever could. And
4:46variety, [music]
4:46the range of different things that
4:48you've tried, offsets the risk of
4:51novelty. So, if you try lots of
4:53different novel things, the odds that at
4:54least one of them connects goes up.
4:57And this is probably why in study after
4:59study of creatives, those who succeed
5:02also have more failures than their
5:04peers. They have more successes, but
5:05more failures, too, because they're just
5:07trying a lot of different things. Burgh
5:09identified two mechanisms. The first is
5:12internal learning. So, you've simply
5:15learned more from that broad, novel
5:17portfolio than you would have from doing
5:19the same kind of thing over and over
5:20again. The second element that Burgh
5:22identified is external expectations.
5:25Once you break through,
5:26the outside world sees you as an
5:28innovator, not a one-trick pony.
5:30Studios, labels, publishers, they give
5:33you more creative freedom, not less.
5:36And that's exactly what happened with
5:37Bowie. His early genre hopping wasn't a
5:40lack of direction, that was his [music]
5:41education.
5:43Each reinvention taught him something
5:45different. And when he did break
5:46through,
5:48nobody tried to pigeonhole him. The
5:49world saw him as someone who could do
5:51anything and kept giving him freedom to
5:53prove it. Frampton became the arena rock
5:55guy. His reputation was narrow and his
5:58creative range was narrow. And when the
5:59world moved on from what he was known
6:01for,
6:02he didn't really have anything left to
6:03draw from. What Bowie discovered
6:05intuitively, and what Berg documented
6:07throughout the music industry, it shows
6:09up again and again when you look at the
6:11actual research on where creative
6:13breakthroughs come from. Now, let me
6:15share a more interesting study on over
6:1718 million research papers. Brian Uzzi,
6:20a sociologist at Northwestern
6:22University, with his colleagues analyzed
6:2418 million scientific papers.
6:27They wanted to understand what makes a
6:29paper a hit,
6:30a breakthrough that can reshape a field.
6:33And the pattern they found was striking.
6:35The most impactful papers featured
6:37mostly conventional combinations of
6:39knowledge, the kind of thing you'd
6:40expect from specialists,
6:42but plus an injection of unusual
6:45combinations from what was typically
6:47outside the field. He described
6:49creativity as an import-export business
6:51of ideas.
6:53You need enough conventional knowledge
6:54to be credible and to understand the
6:56existing landscape, but the spark, the
6:58thing that elevates work from competent
7:00to groundbreaking, comes from importing
7:03something unexpected from somewhere else
7:05into that conventional [music]
7:06knowledge. And he found that teams with
7:08far-flung members, so people from
7:10different institutions, different
7:11countries, different disciplinary
7:13backgrounds, were more likely to produce
7:15those hit papers. Scientists who had
7:18worked abroad were also more likely to
7:19make a greater impact. The diversity of
7:22experience, it wasn't just nice to have,
7:24it was the mechanism of breakthrough.
7:26The lab that couldn't solve its own
7:28problem. Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist,
7:30did something really clever.
7:33He spent 4 years recording the weekly
7:35lab meetings of multiple biology labs.
7:39He wanted to watch creativity happen in
7:41real time, not just study it after the
7:43fact, but actually observe how
7:45scientists respond when something
7:47unexpected shows up in their work.
7:50And what he found was that labs with
7:52researchers from diverse professional
7:54backgrounds
7:56made more varied analogies when
7:58confronted with surprising findings.
8:00They were more reliably able to produce
8:02breakthroughs because when something
8:04didn't go as expected, someone from a
8:06different background could say to their
8:08colleague, "Oh, you know, that reminds
8:10me of something from my field." One lab
8:12in particular had all E. coli
8:14specialists. They were brilliant people
8:16with deep expertise, but that expertise
8:19was all in the same narrow area. When
8:21they ran into a problem that had to do
8:22with a protein filter in this case, they
8:24had to spend weeks experimenting, just
8:26trial and error, and they were unable to
8:27crack it. Meanwhile,
8:29>> [music]
8:29>> another lab that Dunbar was observing,
8:31it had members from chemistry, physics,
8:34biology, genetics, and a med student. It
8:37was a much more diverse group, and they
8:38hit the exact same problem at about the
8:42same time, and they solved it almost
8:44immediately in a lab meeting that same
8:46day. The med student made an analogy
8:48from clinical practice,
8:50and that was that. The specialist lab
8:52barely used any analogies at all. Dunbar
8:55found one lab that really didn't produce
8:56new findings at all was the one where
8:58everyone had the same specialized
9:00backgrounds. So, as he told me,
9:03"When you have all people with the same
9:04background, it's often not that much
9:07better than having just one brain." The
9:09only person to win both an Ig Nobel and
9:11a Nobel. There's a physicist named Andre
9:13Geim who holds a distinction that no one
9:16else on Earth can claim. Maybe some
9:17people wouldn't even want to. He is the
9:19only person in history to have won both
9:21an Ig Nobel Prize
9:23and the Nobel Prize.
9:25For those unfamiliar, the Ig Nobel is a
9:27satirical prize given for research that
9:30makes you laugh and then makes you
9:31think. It's for the year's silliest
9:32research. When you win, you get a
9:35sculpture of Rodin's The Thinker, but
9:36it's tipped off its pedestal lying on
9:38the ground. Geim won his for levitating
9:40a frog using strong electromagnets.
9:42That's right, a real frog floating in
9:45midair. So, that won the year's silliest
9:48research. His Nobel Prize came for
9:50something different, isolating graphene,
9:53the world's first single-atom-thick
9:56material that has extraordinary
9:58properties of strength and electrical
10:00conductivity
10:01and enormous practical applications.
10:03>> [music]
10:03>> It's one of the most important material
10:05discoveries in modern science. What
10:07connects these two achievements is
10:08Geim's creative process. He had what he
10:11called Friday evening experiments in his
10:13lab that everyone participated in. On
10:15Friday [music] nights, when the formal
10:17work week was over,
10:18he would pursue whatever curiosity
10:20struck him.
10:21No goals, no funding applications, no
10:24predetermined direction, just what
10:26happens if we try this interesting
10:28thing. And it was during one of those
10:30Friday evening experiments [music] that
10:31he and his colleagues were ripping thin
10:33strips of graphite pencil lead with
10:36Scotch tape.
10:37And that's what led to the discovery of
10:39graphene. Seems [music] silly,
10:41led to a world-changing breakthrough.
10:43Both his Ig Nobel and his Nobel Prize
10:46came from these wandering, playful
10:49Friday sessions. As Geim said, he
10:51eagerly accepted the Ig Nobel Prize.
10:53>> [music]
10:53>> The Ig Nobel Committee actually asks
10:55scientists if they want to take it
10:57before they get it because they might be
11:00worried about reputational damage, but
11:01Geim accepted it eagerly. So, that
11:03breakthrough didn't come from his
11:05official, focused, funded research
11:07agenda. It was from the stuff on the
11:09margins, the side quests. Similarly, the
11:11Nobel laureate Frances Arnold, who won
11:13for her work in chemistry, made a really
11:15similar point when she was asked, after
11:17winning the Nobel Prize, about where she
11:19thinks breakthroughs come from. And she
11:21said that the biggest opportunities in
11:23science lie at [music] the interfaces
11:25between fields. She was actually being
11:27asked if she was self-conscious about
11:30not being a specialist. And this was her
11:32being interviewed after she won the
11:33Nobel Prize.
11:35Arnold is an engineer by training and in
11:37the early 1980s, she realized that she
11:39could take optimization methods that she
11:41knew from engineering and combine them
11:44with molecular biology to solve problems
11:45in chemistry. Everyone thought it was
11:47nuts. It was completely outside what
11:49people were doing deeply in any one of
11:51those fields.
11:52But after decades of applications,
11:54it proved [music] to be extraordinary.
11:57As Arnold put it, she couldn't have done
11:59it without collaborating with domain
12:01experts. But the breakthrough itself
12:03came from bridging the gap between them.
12:06The polymath pattern. I got really
12:08interested in 3M, which is a company
12:10that you may know for Post-it notes,
12:12because when I used to read these annual
12:13world innovation rankings, 3M was
12:16usually near the top. The other company
12:18names you'd recognize, Apple, Google,
12:20etc. And then 3M would be third, fourth,
12:23or fifth. I realized as I looked into it
12:25that the company has to make a quarter
12:27of its revenue every year from products
12:29that did not exist 5 years ago. They
12:32make tons of different stuff. It's far
12:33beyond Post-it notes. And they did an
12:35internal study operationalizing how
12:38broad or specialized each of their 7,000
12:41inventors actually was.
12:44And that was based on the number of
12:45different technology classes, as
12:47classified by the patent office,
12:48[clears throat]
12:49that those inventors had worked in. And
12:51they found four types of different
12:53inventors at the company. There were the
12:55generalists who had worked across many
12:57areas.
12:58There were specialists who had gone deep
13:00into one. And then there were what you
13:02might call dabblers. They were not that
13:04broad or that deep and they didn't
13:06usually contribute that much. And then
13:07there were the polymaths.
13:09The polymaths would go to a certain
13:11level of depth in one area, then they
13:12would kind of come up for air and go to
13:14that level of depth in another different
13:16area, and then another different area,
13:18and would often end up connecting those
13:20areas where they had some depth. They
13:22were building what one 3M scientist
13:24called a mosaic. Each piece of expertise
13:26informing the others, creating
13:28connections that no pure specialist
13:31could see. The biggest creative
13:32contributions at 3M came from those
13:34polymaths.
13:36Not the generalists, although they did
13:37contribute. Not the specialists,
13:39although they also contributed. The
13:41people who had done both, who had that
13:43depth and [music] breadth. But at a
13:45certain point they would sacrifice even
13:46more and more depth to make sure that
13:48they were connecting different areas.
13:49When I was researching 3M, I spent time
13:51talking to an inventor named Jayashree
13:53Seth. Now, she won the highest award
13:57there is for female engineers, the
13:59lifetime achievement award.
14:00>> [music]
14:00>> And she described herself to me as
14:02exactly that kind of person. A range
14:05person in a highly specialized world.
14:07She actually described her process
14:09>> [music]
14:09>> as mosaic building. She would go around
14:12and talk to colleagues working in
14:14different spaces. And when she realized
14:16they were orbiting a similar problem,
14:18she would bring them together and make
14:20them a pitch for why they should all
14:22work together on something that would be
14:23beneficial for all of them. And she said
14:25it made her super powerful, even though
14:28she was initially self-conscious about
14:30not being a specialist in any area,
14:33because she zigged away from what she
14:34had actually studied for her PhD.
14:36You see this in architecture, too. Frank
14:38Gehry, arguably, maybe inarguably, the
14:41most famous living architect, had a long
14:43wilderness period before his
14:45breakthrough.
14:47He drew from sculpture,
14:48furniture design, even fish forms.
14:51>> [music]
14:51>> And when he finally broke through with
14:53the Guggenheim Bilbao,
14:55it was so transformative that
14:57researchers coined a term for it, the
14:59Bilbao effect, when a single building
15:02reshapes an [music] entire city and its
15:04economic fortunes. That kind of impact,
15:06it doesn't come from staying in one
15:08lane. It comes from the mosaic. Gehry
15:11was a relentless experimenter. He even
15:13experimented on his own house, trying to
15:15test at a small scale things that he
15:17might apply on a large one. Experiment
15:20after experiment. Let me tell you about
15:22one more creator, and this one's a
15:23little different because he actually did
15:25try to specialize, repeatedly actually.
15:27He had incredible work ethic. He worked
15:29as an art dealer until he was basically
15:31fired. Then 14-hour days as a teacher
15:34and a handyman for a school. And then he
15:36became a private tutor. And after the
15:38school, he worked as a bookseller. His
15:40work ethic was insane in everything he
15:43did. He worked at the bookstore from
15:458:00 a.m. to midnight, and he loved
15:46books.
15:47He once single-handedly saved most of
15:50the books in the store during a flood by
15:52physically carrying them to safety for
15:54hours, load by load.
15:56After that, he trained to be a pastor,
15:58staying up all night copying texts and
16:01reminding himself that practice makes
16:02perfect. He put candles
16:04>> [music]
16:04>> in a half-empty water so that he could
16:06study late at night. But Latin and
16:08Greek, they they didn't come easily to
16:10him, and he flamed out.
16:12He eventually became an itinerant
16:13preacher in the coal country.
16:16That didn't really work out, either.
16:18Each time he found something new, he
16:19decided it was his true calling. He'd
16:21write to his parents and say, "You'll
16:22never have to worry about me again. I
16:23found my calling."
16:25And then each time he would flame out
16:26spectacularly. Finally, nearing the age
16:29of 30 with kind of no possessions and no
16:31achievements to his name, he picked up a
16:33book called The Guide to the ABCs of
16:36Drawing. It was written for kids, and he
16:38started drawing the life he saw around
16:40him in the countryside.
16:41That man is Vincent van Gogh.
16:44And even once he started painting and
16:46drawing, progress [music] came
16:48incredibly slowly. He experimented like
16:50crazy. At one point, he decided that all
16:53color was just shades of black, and he
16:55would only paint in shades of black, no
16:57color.
16:58Then he completely reversed that and
16:59decided there is no black in nature,
17:01only shades of other colors.
17:03Then he decided to paint only figures,
17:05people. That's what an artist should do.
17:07And then turn around and abandon that
17:08completely when it turned out he wasn't
17:09great at it.
17:10He dove from one experiment to the next
17:13until finally
17:14he combined them to create a style
17:17completely unique to the world, and then
17:20he exploded.
17:22Everything you've ever seen, most
17:24likely, that he created, Starry Night,
17:26the sunflowers, all of it, was from the
17:28last 2 years of his life, when he
17:30combined [music] his experiments into
17:32something no one had ever seen before,
17:34and became a bridge from classical to
17:36modern art.
17:38Those weren't detours. They were
17:40training to create [music]
17:41a style that was uniquely his own.
17:44The creative cliff illusion. There's one
17:46more piece of research I want to leave
17:47you with, because I think it explains
17:49why so many creatives give up on breadth
17:52too early. There's a phenomenon
17:53researchers have identified called the
17:55creative cliff illusion.
17:58It's the belief that your best ideas
17:59come quickly, [music] in a flash of
18:01insight, or that they won't come at all.
18:03Most people assume that if something
18:05didn't come to them right away in a
18:06flash of inspiration, they should move
18:09on.
18:10But the research shows the opposite. The
18:12best ideas tend to come later in
18:14brainstorming, not right away. We quit
18:17too early. We abandon the messy
18:19exploration phase before the connections
18:21have had time to form. Don't assume that
18:23if something didn't come to you with
18:24that flash of insight that you should
18:25just stop thinking about it. That's the
18:27illusion. The cliff isn't real.
18:29Keep going. So, if you're a creative
18:31person and you feel pressured to niche
18:33down, to pick a lane and stay in it,
18:36I want you to consider the possibility
18:37that the pressure itself may be a
18:39problem, may be counterproductive for
18:41you. The comic book creators who worked
18:43across the most genres eventually
18:45produced the biggest hits. The musicians
18:46who confused everyone with their
18:48reinventions often outlasted the more
18:50narrow specialists, like the arena rock
18:52king, by decades in some cases. The
18:55physicist who played on Friday nights
18:56won the Nobel Prize. The engineer who
18:59wandered into biology won one, too. The
19:01scientists who drew from the widest
19:02range of backgrounds and got together in
19:05a team solved problems that teams of
19:06specialists just couldn't crack. The
19:08architect who pulled from sculpture and
19:10furniture design built a building that
19:12transformed a city. The painter who
19:14failed at everything he did, failed
19:16again and again and again and again and
19:18again five different careers.
19:21And then he found painting and changed
19:23[music] how we think about beauty
19:24itself. Your scattered interests aren't
19:27a weakness. Your genre hopping, it's not
19:29necessarily a lack of focus. Your weird
19:32side projects don't have to be
19:33distractions.
19:35They might be exactly the thing that
19:37makes your work unlike anyone else's. If
19:40you like this topic, you're probably
19:41going to like my book Range, why
19:43generalists triumph in a specialized
19:45world. It expands on all these topics
19:47with more stories and more [music]
19:48research. But before you go buy that, I
19:51created a free PDF summary of the entire
19:54book that you can go download in the
19:56link in my description for free. Thanks
19:58so much for watching. If you like this
20:00video, there's another one I made right
20:02here.