Focus on Quality
hype fades, Quality endures
I.
Think of a viral song that’s stuck in your ear for weeks. It’s played on the air waves, your social media feeds are flooded with it too. But after that, they just vanish.
Think of a big-budget tentpole flick, it dominated the box office for a month. The success spawned sequels and copycats that nobody seems to care about.
There are too many examples to count. They are so ubiquitous that we can only cite examples of songs or films that are exceptional.
Yet, there are other works that flew beneath notice, works that were ignored (or at least not given a second thought) at first. But over time, these works gained a devoted following. It might even be an influential piece of work.
For example, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Released in 1984, the song drew little attention, and no acclaim. It took Hallelujah over 20 years, and several cover versions, for it to gain recognition as a moving anthem.
In film, Blade Runner had mixed reception with North American audiences and critics at first. At best, it developed a cult-following. But today, it's well known how important and influential Blade Runner is as a film. It birthed the Cyberpunk genre, inspired other artists, and influenced the design of modern tech like the iPhone and Cybertruck.
The most popular works aren’t always the best. Popularity does not predict longevity.
So, what determines whether a piece of art endures or evaporates?
The key to creating work with lasting impact is quality.
II.
In creative endeavors, commitment to quality is your best chance for success.
While quality cannot give you immediate recognition, it provides a foundation for enduring success.
Even as market trends shift, quality of work remains a realm where you have agency.
Because quality is within your control. Quality is born of relentless iteration, refinement and the sheer number of hours you invest into your work.
In contrast, popularity depends on a confluence of factors such as social influence and a lot of luck. These are forces beyond anyone’s reach.
III.
In the early 2000s, an experiment conducted by researchers Salganik, Dodds and Watts showed that social influence plays an outsized role in success. The experiment used an artificial music market (via a website) to test the effects of social influence.
The researchers set up a clever experiment to isolate the effects of quality and social influence by separating participants into two groups:
Group 1: The participants get to decide which songs to listen to, rate the song out of 5 stars, and then given the option to download the songs. The participants, however, were not given information on the songs’ rating from other participants or the number of downloads. This is the independent group. The rating and downloads acts as the experiment’s proxy for quality.
Group 2: In addition to being able to rate and download songs, the participants in this group can see how many times the songs have been downloaded by previous participants. This is the socially influenced group.
Compared to the outcome of Group 1, the researchers found that Group 2 has a more unequal distribution of outcomes. The songs that started off popular, became even more popular. But the songs that were unpopular, barely even registered new downloads. They demonstrated that social influence plays a large role.
While quality could not precisely predict which song would be the breakout hit, the researchers found that the best rated songs, as a group, did pretty well. Though, there were no guarantees. In his book Rockonomics, the late Alan Krueger summarized the research “It appears that quality gives a song a chance of becoming popular, but quality is not sufficient in and of itself, given the haphazard interactions in social networks.”
Another experiment by Salganik and Watts. used a similar website design in testing the perception of a song’s popularity. Not just popularity per se. The researchers posted 48 songs on the website. For the first 750 participants, they were invited to listen and download the songs. The difference here is that the participants were allowed to see the exact download count for each of the 48 songs up to that point.
The researchers then split the next 6,000 participants randomly into two groups:
1st Group: They could see the true download counts, from the 1st to the 48th song in order. This acts as the baseline or control group.
2nd Group: The researchers flipped the download counts, thereby flipping the rankings. So the number 1 song is now the last, the 48th song became first place, number 2 goes to 47th and so on. The idea is to give a false impression of popularity, and to determine to what extent it influences outcomes.
The first group has a similar result to the previous experiment, the popular song got even more popular, the unpopular song seems to be forgotten. It was already known that social influence and to some extent, quality can influence ranking. But what happens when the social influence is biased, or altered?
In the second group, the least popular song somehow maintained its top spot. The final ranking in this second group bears no resemblance to the ‘true’ ranking of the songs. Bummer. The perception of popularity is enough to warp outcomes. No wonder so much junk clogs social media feeds.
Of course, these are lab experiments done under controlled conditions. Reality is messier. PR campaigns, brand reputation and marketing stunts can influence the consensus for popularity. Moreover, the experiment was done before social media was a thing. There’s an incentive to fuel both hype and backlash on those platforms.
In truth, there are far more forces outside of our control besides social influence and luck.
But there’s hope. While the clever manipulation of rankings altered outcomes, the researchers estimated that in the long-run, the best songs recovered (some of) their popularity. It appears that popularity is short-lived, while inherent quality endures.
IV.
The Salganik et al experiments give a damning impression – popularity is fleeting, manipulated and even quality offers no guaranteed pathway to recognition. Yet these same experiments hint at the enduring power of quality work. So if the path focused on quality offers no certain outcomes, why bother at all?
Because quality outlasts the hype. Trends may come and go, but good work keeps its value. It might even appreciate in value. A track record of quality work is social capital. It builds trust. That trust in your quality attracts collaborators and a devoted audience, slowly.
Moreover, quality is not about the external rewards it might earn you, but the fulfillment and meaning it brings to the process itself. When you commit to quality, you elevate your craft above chasing fads. It allows you to experiment and improve in ways that work for you, not you working for the algorithm.
V.
A commitment to quality is a personal responsibility. It is not what the algorithm wants, quality is what you want to bring into the world. This means success is defined ON your terms. It becomes a personal challenge, a pursuit of excellence, or an expression of the values you hold most dearly.
Of course, it’s not going to be easy. The pursuit of quality means standards have to be set high, and it takes relentless effort to achieve them.
Though, in all likelihood, your work might not get noticed at all. You cannot control how the world will respond.
But you can control your work – that’s where the true power lies. By steadily building a body of work you are proud to own, quality grants you the power to shape your creative destiny.
No matter how your work is received, you’ll always have the satisfaction of knowing you have given your best and all.