How to Make Your Odds of Creative Success Go Way Up

It’s a numbers game, and other insights from the work of creativity expert Dean Simonton.

OK, so maybe writing a new Science of Creativity post every day was an unrealistic goal ;-). I’m shifting to a schedule of twice a week. But as I do so, I want to share with you a theory about why we should be creating as much work as possible—a theory that I find provocative and rich and yes, pretty persuasive (even if I can’t always apply it to the maximum extent).

About 25 years ago, Dean Simonton—now an emeritus professor at UC-Davis—proposed what he called the “equal odds rule.” Simonton’s studies of scientists, artists, composers and other creators led him to conclude that any piece of artistic or scholarly work had odds roughly equal to any other work in terms of becoming recognized as popular or important. The number of successful ideas a creator has, he determined, is proportional to the overall quantity of ideas generated by that creator. 

The simple takeaway from Simonton’s work is that if we want to have a hit, we should be creating as much as possible. All right, point taken. But I think there are several other, more nuanced points embedded in Simonton’s work that I want to draw out. 

Point 1: Creativity is a lot like evolution: first blind, then selective.

In his work, Simonton pointed to an earlier idea proposed by psychologist Donald Campbell: that creativity is an evolutionary process that operates much like Darwinian natural selection. Campbell wrote that creative work, like evolution in the natural world, is driven by two powerful forces: blind variation and selective retention. 

Via the combination and mutation of genes, nature produces many variations; these are “blind” in the sense that there is no governing intelligence that is purposefully generating variations that promise to be adaptive. Instead, a whole lot of random variations are tossed out into the world; most fail, but a few succeed. Those that do succeed survive and reproduce and stick around; this is the selective retention part.

The creative process operates in a similar fashion, Campbell suggested: a creator more or less blindly generates new ideas and combinations of ideas; only the ones that succeed are selectively retained.

Who decides what gets retained? Well, we do; as creators, we make decisions about retention thousands of times across the creation of a work. We delete the stilted opening paragraph, or toss aside the awkward sketch.

But there’s another, larger process of selective retention going on as well—which brings us to the next point . . . 

Point 2: No one can predict how the world will respond to a creative work—least of all its creator. 

Sometimes a piece of work hits a collective nerve; usually it doesn’t. No one can predict what will go viral today, let alone what will be celebrated decades or centuries from now. And as creators, we have blind spots that are particular to us: we’re often too close to our work to judge it objectively, and we have emotional attachments to our work that may not be shared by our audience. 

Simonton has noted that great artists are no more astute than we are in this regard: “Handel hoped to stake his fame on the merits of operas seldom heard today, and Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are not the most frequently performed or recorded by posterity,” Simonton wrote. “The creative genius seems unable to determine which works will earn future applause.” 

The meaning and the value of our work isn’t determined by us alone. Which means that . . . 

Point 3: Putting our work out into the world is part of the creative process. 

I’m a big believer in intrinsic motivation—in doing our work simply because we love to do it. And our work will always hold private, personal meaning for us, its creator. But the experience of publishing three books and many articles has persuaded me that my work isn’t finished when I append the last period to the last sentence. It continues to evolve, to use Donald Campbell’s analogy, as it enters the minds of the people who encounter it. 

This is in itself a profoundly creative process. Some ideas sink without a trace, but others are retained and even elaborated upon. People who have read my books have come back to me with related insights and ideas that never occurred to me as I was writing. 

What I like about Dean Simonton’s work is that it acknowledges the randomness and the dynamism of the creative enterprise, at every stage. It’s hard to be rigid and perfectionistic about the creative process once you recognize that it’s all a big, unpredictable, glorious mess. 

How about you? Have you observed a relationship between how much you create and how successful the work is?