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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

This sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

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.

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

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

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong

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.

It is tempting to say, as my friend suggested, that these online identities are caricatures of the real me. It is certainly true that social media can unleash the cruellest side of human nature.

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

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.