Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [6]
There exists a vast gulf of randomness and uncertainty between the creation of a great novel—or piece of jewelry or chocolate-chip cookie—and the presence of huge stacks of that novel—or jewelry or bags of cookies—at the front of thousands of retail outlets. That’s why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set—the set of people who don’t give up.
A lot of what happens to us—success in our careers, in our investments, and in our life decisions, both major and minor—is as much the result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work. So the reality that we perceive is not a direct reflection of the people or circumstances that underlie it but is instead an image blurred by the randomizing effects of unforeseeable or fluctuating external forces. That is not to say that ability doesn’t matter—it is one of the factors that increase the chances of success—but the connection between actions and results is not as direct as we might like to believe. Thus our past is not so easy to understand, nor is our future so easy to predict, and in both enterprises we benefit from looking beyond the superficial explanations.
WE HABITUALLY UNDERESTIMATE THE EFFECTS of randomness. Our stockbroker recommends that we invest in the Latin American mutual fund that “beat the pants off the domestic funds” five years running. Our doctor attributes that increase in our triglycerides to our new habit of enjoying a Hostess Ding Dong with milk every morning after dutifully feeding the kids a breakfast of mangoes and nonfat yogurt. We may or may not take our stockbroker’s or doctor’s advice, but few of us question whether he or she has enough data to give it. In the political world, the economic world, the business world—even when careers and millions of dollars are at stake—chance events are often conspicuously misinterpreted as accomplishments or failures.
Hollywood provides a nice illustration. Are the rewards (and punishments) of the Hollywood game deserved, or does luck play a far more important role in box office success (and failure) than people imagine? We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius. Yet the idea that no one can know in advance whether a film will hit or miss has been an uncomfortable suspicion in Hollywood at least since the novelist and screenwriter William Goldman enunciated it in his classic 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade. In that book, Goldman quoted the former studio executive David Picker as saying, “If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the other ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.”9
That’s not to say that a jittery homemade horror video could become a hit just as easily as, say, Exorcist: The Beginning, which cost an estimated $80 million. Well, actually, that is what happened some years back with The Blair Witch Project: it cost the filmmakers a mere $60,000 but brought in $140 million in domestic box office revenue—more than three times the business of Exorcist. Still, that’s not what Goldman was saying. He was referring only to professionally made Hollywood films with production values good enough to land the film a respectable distributor. And Goldman didn’t deny that there are reasons for a film’s box office performance. But he did say that those reasons are so complex and the path from green light to opening weekend so vulnerable to unforeseeable and uncontrollable influences that educated guesses about an unmade film’s potential aren’t much better than flips of a coin.
Examples of Hollywood’s unpredictability are easy to find. Movie buffs will remember the great expectations the studios had for the megaflops Ishtar (Warren Beatty + Dustin Hoffman + a $55 million budget = $14 million in box office revenue) and Last Action Hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger + $85 million = $50 million). On the other hand, you might recall the grave doubts that executives at Universal Studios