"My job is to buy lottery tickets"
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Several years ago I was talking to an acquiring editor at HarperCollins. I was asking him about the particulars of his job, and he shared something in a moment of honesty: “Kyle, my job is to buy lottery tickets. Every book I acquire is a lottery ticket. I know most of them won’t be winners, but if the winners offset the losers, I get to keep my job.” To be clear, he wasn’t saying that he just acquires books at random and hopes for the best. On the contrary, he told me he works very hard to find good books, and he tries his best to be a good steward of his publisher’s resources. But even so, experience has taught him there are no guarantees in the book business. I think creative projects work the same way. Each of my creative projects is a lottery ticket. Like my editor friend, I try to pick projects that I think have the highest chance of success. But experience has taught me (sometimes painfully) that there are no guaranteed winners. Sometimes I will work extraordinarily hard on a project, only to have it launch to crickets. Other times I will put almost no effort into a project and it will go viral. I’ve tried to figure out what makes the difference, but so far I’ve found no smoking gun. There’s a difference between my lottery tickets and my publisher’s, though: Mine are much cheaper. An acquiring editor has to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a book and bring it to market. But for creative projects, the cost is often negligible. If anything, the highest cost is usually time. There are lots of things that work this way, too. Social media posts are lottery tickets. So are new jokes or stories you try onstage. Cold-emailing someone you admire is a way of buying a lottery ticket, and so is pitching an idea in a meeting. Individually, each one has a minuscule chance of changing your life. But if you keep stacking attempts, you increase your chances of hitting the jackpot. And as long as the winners offset the losers, you get to keep playing the game. The good news is, when the only cost of a lottery ticket is a bit of courage and time, you can afford to lose most of your bets. So how many tickets are you buying? Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one. P.S. Speaking of lottery tickets, I could use your help with one I'm betting big on. My next book, How Ideas Work, comes out in January. If you want to stop waiting on inspiration and start generating great ideas and bringing them to life, this book will show you how. Preorders are open now! |
Kyle Scheele
One useful idea about creative leadership, once a week
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