This is a big marketing lesson in general. All to often I see managers tell me they want to be the <insert something popular> brand. More often than not I ask them is that true about this company? Many don't see the connection between promoting something true to your core vs what you want to be perceived as. Some literally feel offended no being what they want to be even when it's clear.
The line I reuse is, "Find a fundamental truth, then celebrate it"
Truth doesn't mean you cant polish and choose the best angle, but the truth must be there and exist today.
One of the classic examples is the Guiness dancing man. They literally celebrated how long it takes to pour a Guiness vs ignoring or tying to make out it's not that long. Brilliant marketing: https://youtu.be/69MpLiYhsXw
It's very similar to the career-focused work carried out in the field of personality type.
I used to go to organizations and interview members, and then help describe to them where their arrow was going to consistently land, based on the favored personality-perspectives of those who worked there. You'd quickly get a picture of how everybody worked together, and then it'd click.
Boom, "if there's a way to paint a target right about...
here, so to speak, definitely do it." That kind of thing.
It was interesting to me because the work often showed a very sharp relief around the concept of "core self" and "projected persona". A lot of people run fantasy businesses and effectively hallucinate what it is they do, or offer. This feels like a tremendous mission to them of course, and it provides important energy.
But you had to be very careful about telling people that the persona--or the "who I want people to think I am / we are" was by definition generally less available in terms of raw productivity energy. This would tend to kick the logic stool out from underneath their value proposition. Then they automatically think, "of course, so life has to be boring."
IOW if you were telling an architectural illustration firm, established and profitable after years of hard work, that they were basically a political advocacy organization by default, and probably couldn't _not_ be that if they tried--that was not really something you could just come out and say to everybody.
So to this day I'm very familiar with orgs out there that are hired for architectural illustration or whatever, and then the topic of political maneuvering comes up, and the client suddenly pulls them in closer, and later keeps asking for illustration work in the future, because...well, probably because they like the huge discount they get on political strategy!
That the vendor doesn't want to look at their own work this way is not the client's problem, and the accompanying under-valuing of their services definitely seems to be a covert benefit.
In some ways, the less such an essay says, the easier it is to become a “tabula rasa,” where the reader fills in the huge, empty spaces with things they already believe.
The next step is to applaud the essay because the reader feels it “feels right.” Of course it feels right if you mentally fill in the blanks, and if it says nothing that can be empirically falsified.
It took me a second to understand that you mean the article, not the comment you replied to.
I agree. I think the title is insightful, but I was surprised to see that the article picked a single, poor example to develop it. This is probably being upvoted for the title only.
It can still spark interesting discussion here though.
The general principle is good, and can be found in literally any textbook about market segmentation and business strategy. And the idea of motivating the reader by giving an example is sound, even though in and of themselves, single examples reek to high heaven of survivorship bias.
If it motivates someone to not give up because they don’t seem to fit the existing templates for success, that is necessary, but not sufficient by a long shot.
What’s missing are concrete tactics for succeeding with the strategy of “make your own niche.” Lacking specific tactics for replication—at any scale, in any field—its primary value IMO is as an exhortation to go out and research how to succeed with this strategy.
It’s only a short essay, so it really has no more weight then the preface of a book. And that’s what it reads like: An anecdote at the beginning of a book about succeeding as a niche or specialized entity…
Only the rest of the book—with specific chapters detailing the strategy at finer levels of detail and laying out tactics to thrive—is missing. We are left to either fumble around blindly, frustrated that we are unable to “paint the target around our arrow,” or go out and do a lot more reading and learning to assemble the rest of the book by hand.
If anyone does find this inspirational or thought-provoking, there are entire books touching on the subject that provide a lot more value. If this motivates people to go out and read such books, it’s not a complete waste of time, but it is incomplete and fails to say “Hey, this is just to whet your appetite, this is the beginning of a long journey. Bruce took decades to discover what worked by trial and error and working with others, you can read these books to get you started on the right road.”
I’ll contribute one book recommendation: “Marketing Warfare” by Reis and Trout. It’s also lightweight and easily digestible, but it contains a simple model of competition that divides business into four different strategies (offence, defence, flanking, guerrilla) and then details specific advice for success in each one.
What they call “guerrilla” is closest to what this essay espouses, and readers may find their advice a little more actionable. But even then, that book is not a complete how-to. You have to keep learning and keep researching.
>Instead of aiming for the same target as other musicians—trying to out-sing or out-play them—Springsteen instead doubled down on the quality that made him unique: His ability to write song lyrics.
No, the ability to write song lyrics does not make Bruce Springsteen unique. He didn't exploit some weird angle that no other performer had considered. And it's worth noting his breakout hit, "Born in the USA" was popular because few people actually listened to the lyrics. It sounds like a patriotic song until you actually listen to what he says.
Bruce Springsteen was famous from Born to Run well before Born in the USA. And I don't believe the meaning of the title track was ever misconstrued, it was simply aggressively misused. But our national anthem is also a guy asking if the country will survive, so maybe that's just how we like our patriotic songs.
If anything the lesson here is focus on what you're good at (songwriting), and outsource what you're bad at to people who are as good as you at what you're good at. The E Street Band has been filled with consistently amazing musicians. Springsteen as another Dylan would have never made it big.
And Australia had as a credible proposal for its national anthem a bush ballad about a sheep thief that committed suicide when the police caught up with him.
I like to think that Waltzing Matilda is much more understood than Born In The USA. It’s a bit more in the Aussie culture to run with something like that. The Born In the USA American crowd on the other hand self-identifies is infallible and their homeland is their sacred cow. I’d eat my hat if the majority of people who like that song know more than 4 words from it.
I remember my 9th grade English teacher asking us what the song Born in the USA was about. We responded with mumbly, "rah rah, America, patriotism." This was just before Nevermind came out so we didn't know we were supposed to think everything was dumb. Anyway, she gave us all a copy of the lyrics and then had us listen to the song. We were blown away...and well prepared for Grunge.
> But our national anthem is also a guy asking if the country will survive, so maybe that's just how we like our patriotic songs.
Even the over the top “America the Beautiful” has the line “God mend thy every flaw”. The founders were very focused on the fallibility of those in power.
I was a teen in high school when Born in the USA came out. As I recall, it was described to me as a “Come Back” album from an artist whose previous work had “saved rock and roll”.
And it wasn't the only one. I remember a short snippet of Fortunate Son was used to imply it was a patriotic song in a TV ad (Wrangler jeans I think?). The line being "Some folks were made to wave the flag, ooh the red, white, and blue"
The song, released in 1969, is quite clearly a criticism of the US's Vietnam policy. It's not likely to be mistaken for anything else (the way Born in the USA occasionally is), but still was aggressively misused.
> "Born in the USA" was popular because few people actually listened to the lyrics
I hear this repeated often, but is it even true? Couldn’t also be true that the song is popular because people can relate it to their negative feelings about “the system” and a weird sense of patriotism they feel regardless? It’s pretty common to have mixed feelings about one’s country.
Assuming the song is only popular because of ignorance seems far fetched.
>> "Born in the USA" was popular because few people actually listened to the lyrics
> I hear this repeated often, but is it even true?
I was a mid-western teenager when "Born in the USA" came out. My friends all knew the lyrics -- we hung out in the back of the bus, and shouted them out for 30 minutes on the ride to school. The lyrics spoke to our insecurity: fear of poverty, fear of being sent off in war, and the futility of it all. No one wanted to talk about the empty factories our bus drove past, or the parents that lost their jobs. Springsteen spoke to this, he captured our lived experience. The tune was fantastic. But it was the lyrics that clinched the deal.
That whole album was filled with singable songs: I'm on Fire, Glory Days, and especially My Hometown. The verses were especially catchy and clear as a bell, Springsteen pronounced the lyrics clearly so you hear, understand, and memorize them.
Whilst I can only speak anecdata, in my experience majority of people who "know" the song definitely only know the chorus, and have no idea about the song's history or lyrics. They'll sing along (loudly, I might add) during the chorus, but go hush during the verses.
This [1] is Bruce Springsteen performing the song very differently to how you might normally hear it. For me, this particular style seems to "fit" better with the subject matter.
As a brazilian kid that did not spoke english in the 80's (just like 99% of the folks down here), Born in the USA was a huge hit simply because it's catchy as hell, the melody is a pop rock masterpiece. I sung this song for over 10 years without having any idea what the lyrics meant other than the guy was born in the usa, and it was still a great song. Now that I'm fluent in english, to tell you the truth Springsteen is a very mediocre song writer, his lyrics are what a "very deep" preteen would write if he wanted to sound good to his middle school crush, the evil maaaannn, the government is baaaaaad, I got my motorcycle, I am a simple guy that work with my hands.... Man, finding out the lyrics for most of his songs was almost as bad as learning the lyrics for Midnight Oil songs after years of singing a lot to their hits.
I would buy-into the idea that quite a few people only know the song from the chorus ("born in the USA").
But the general public apparently has a short memory for complete song lyrics (or just enjoys a good catchy jingle.) In the past decade I've heard:
a. A song about raping and pillaging (Led Zepplin/Immigrant Song) used to sell Cadillac SUVs.
b. A song about a deadly disease (Gang of Four/Anthrax) used to sell Burritos and Tacos.
c. A song about random hook-ups in Texas (ACDC/Thunderstruck) used to sell... not sure what it was pitching... Apple commercials are sometimes vague.
d. A song about kidnapping pretty women (Johnny Guitar Watson/Gangster of Love) used to sell whatever the hell it is Axe is selling.
Though using the Ronettes "Be My Baby" to sell Cialis seems to be about right. All good rock songs are about sex, so using a song about hooking up to sell a product that makes it easy for old dudes to hook up seems spot on.
I think my point is a) Bruce Springsteen and Brian Eno had TONS of great songs before "Born in the USA" and various Talking Heads tunes and b) people don't listen to song lyrics when interacting with commercials. If they did, they sure as hell wouldn't eat at Taco Bell. (Though I have to admit, using "Anthrax" in a Taco Bell ad was inspired culture jamming. So... hats off to whichever random ad creative who snuck that in under the radar.)
Also... if you're analyzing ads based on song lyrics, I think you've missed the point. The advertisers aren't expecting people to listen to the lyrics, critically analyze them and then attempt to relate those concepts to the product being advertised.
Music in ads is (pretty much) exclusively there to establish an affective context. It's sort of like they're saying "hey. remember this song! remember when you were young and didn't have a mortgage and were dating that crazy blonde chic? this product will make you feel like that."
> "Born in the USA" was popular because few people actually listened to the lyrics. It sounds like a patriotic song until you actually listen to the lyrics.
That actually is a neat trick. Make a catchy tune that sounds like it says what dumb people like, but have a subtleties in the text, which dumb people won't notice, that turn the things around and let smart people like it for subversiveness.
Then you capture all of the audience. Provided that the tune is really catchy.
I think these happen because many genuinely don't see the difference. The amount of times abusive relationships are shown as something desirable, in popular media, can also not be a coincidence.
If you’re into that, you should check out Third Eye Blind. Consistently cheery/fun sounding pop rock music with some of the most insanely grim lyrics you can find.
The words and meanings of songs have never been important so long as the tune was good. Yankee Doodle was essentially a dis track, but Americans liked the tune, so it was adopted as a patriotic song anyway. Stadiums of homophobes will happily stomp and clap to We Will Rock You.
This isn't bad advice. The obvious risk is you can spend your whole life (and then some) waiting for the world to catch up with your own special weirdness.
But maybe that doesn't matter. Short of starving, some people are happier being themselves than trying to fit into someone else's dream.
Not all people, though! You need to decide where you belong (but at some point it's going to be obvious anyway).
A big point that the article is missing is the work put in.
If you're the kind of person that shoots several arrows, one (or more) of them is bound to hit and then you double down. It's a mix of luck, insight into opportunities, timing etc. Not a reliable formula for success but one that increases chances.
Just doing a lot of work opens up opportunities that idle planners can't even imagine.
I'd actually say that there is a shortage of opportunity and that most people are willing to put in the work or already have put in the work but it was just never fruitful
While I agree that the article is a bit specious, I think there is a deeper argument to be made about Springstein's specific kind of lyrics.
As mentioned in the article, his lyrics are about blue-collar workers and the associated struggles and life. This was probably an under-served / poorly talked about community when he was on the rise. It's just a case of focussing on an under-served market. I'm not sure of Springsteins' background, but if he came from a blue-collar background, then he would have known his community / market really well.
So I guess the lesson is, serve an under-served market with talent that's good enough. It helps if you, yourself, are the customer :)
I can name two other well-known acts off the top of my head that at least partly serve the same "market": Billy Joel (who incidentally is the same age as Springsteen) with songs like "Allentown" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allentown_(song)) and Bon Jovi with songs like "Livin' on a prayer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livin%27_on_a_Prayer). However Joel (who can also be described as a legend) has been semi-retired for the last 30 years, with his last album coming out in 1993, and Bon Jovi are probably a bit too commercial (and have failed to live up to their big success in the eighties/nineties). So it's not like the market was underserved, but Springsteen has a special combination of staying power/intellectual appeal/whatever else that makes him unique...
Paint the general area where the arrow might go, then shoot the arrow, and finally remove all the paint that doesn't constitute a target perfectly hit. That way you're not doing suspicious things to the target people might call you on.
Of course, your ability to hit a target in reality has nothing to do with the number of other people aiming at it - in this case, Bruce Springsteen's ability to write great songs is not constrained by the existence of many other brilliant songwriters.
This sort of free-association discourse seems very popular in marketing/ entrepreneurial/ motivational blogging but sadly it's not that informative or educational.
That was the first thing I thought of when I read the article. The verdict seems to be conflicting with the supporting evidence:
> He can play the guitar, but “the world is filled with plenty of good guitar players, many of them my match or better,” he writes in his excellent memoir, Born to Run
Should we assume that there aren't as many good lyric writers, who are Springsteen's match or better? This doesn't sound plausible, nor it is hinted by the article.
I interpreted it more as Springsteen knowing he was a better lyricist than he was a singer or guitar player, and as such played to his own strengths by focusing on that.
If everything's a competition of sorts, you're more likely to "win" if you enter in your strongest category. Even if that category isn't the category that tends to carry the most prestige (e.g., being a strong lyricist is arguably less legendary in itself than being a strong instrumentalist).
This to me feels more like the classic argument for being multi-talented. There’s lots of people who can play a guitar, or write song lyrics, or sing. There’s not so many who can do all three to the required standard to make a living from it.
Plus, it's been shown that there's plenty of equally talented musicians as Bruce Springsteen. He just edged the others out by a process that we might as well call luck.
There is more to it than just hard work. There are a lot of people who would be able to put on a four hour show, but would people want to watch it? Four hour concerts are celebrated only if the entertainer can grip the audience for four hours.
They should really have used an example like John Smith who made it to Level 6 SWE at Google instead of Level 4, because he kept his passion for low level coding (even though everyone was say "do web programming") or something. But that would be too prosaic I guess!
Oh sure, do that. But don't forget that these kinds of articles are written by lucky people whose "targets" were of interest to others. Would you care if I told you I held a world record in the 98m sprint?
Embrace your weirdness, but unless you are lucky enough to have a weirdness that resonates with people, you are just an outcast.
Enjoy everything in moderation, including your qualities that may come off as unusual to others, whatever they may be.
You are probably an ordinary person. Chill out and just do your best.
I think this is on point, and also: an ordinary person is extreme, ie, there will be parameters outside the normal interval. This is because there are so many dimensions of personality, and the higher the number of dimensions, the more surface-to-volume you get for a given volume. So if personalities are sampled from a hypersphere, it is likely to get a point on the surface in the high dimensional case.
> Would you care if I told you I held a world record in the 98m sprint? .. unless you are lucky enough to have a weirdness that resonates with people, you are just an outcast.
Maybe living an enjoyable life isn't about making a name for yourself. The point isn't to do something that other people find interesting. Its to do something you find interesting.
One of my old friends from grade school is an international coffee judge. Every year he goes to some big coffee event where he meets a lot of the growers of coffee from all over the world. He drinks a lot of coffee, judges which beans are the best that year and places a bunch of orders on behalf of multinational coffee companies for coffee beans from farmers. Do I care about coffee? No. Is he famous? No. But he seems to be having a great time. He's not an outcast. The opposite - he's found his people.
I'm kind of the same. I've been working on collaborative editing systems for the last decade. Why? I don't really know. They're just full of nice puzzles that are fun to solve. I've written some systems in my niche which have been world firsts. And some hold world records for performance. I don't do it because you - or anyone else cares. I do it because I care. Because I enjoy this kind of work. There's maybe about 50 people in the world who work on this stuff. Thats more than enough community for me.
Maybe we are all oddballs. Ok by me. The alternative sounds boring.
> the qualities you suppress the most—because they make you weird or different from other people. At some point in your life, you were probably shamed for embodying those qualities, so you learned to conceal them.
> But here’s the thing: We notice things because of contrast. Something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it.
The other thing that happens is that you get so used to your own quirks and traits that they don't seem remarkable whatsoever, like how the fish can't tell it's swimming in water. And then particularly for introverts, if you don't get out and contrast yourself agains the people around you, it's easy to go around life with no concept of what makes you unique.
Funny he pins Springsteen’s success on his lyricism when he was using a rhyming dictionary to write basically all of Welcome to Asbury Park and was obviously aping the blue collar poeticism of Bob Dylan.
I love Springsteen, but it’s mostly because the E Street band is absolutely bonkers good.
Regarding your mention of rhyming dictionaries, it's perhaps not widely known, but they are not considered cheats by most songwriters, but rather essential tools of the trade, like code editors or inline docs for programmers.
If you pointedly refuse to use one you're not being more authentic, you're just making your job much harder.
At the risk of destroying the mystique of the craft, I will also say that they are not used in the way you might think. Instead of writing the second line of a verse and then looking for a rhyming word that somehow fits, it's common to compile lists of relevant rhymes to your starter material and theme, and work backwards, creating lines that connect to the rhymes. If you do this the other way around it's very hard to write meaningful verses without abandoning your rhyming scheme.
Outside of the obvious things you can do (or shouldn't do) for your health, it kind of comes down to genetics and luck.
Remember Pope John Paul II in his final years, about as infirm as you can get short of actually dying? He lived a pretty healthy life, was known as "healthy" when appointed (which stood out as several of the previous popes had health issues), but was "only" 84 when he died and suffered from serious health issues ten years prior to his death.
Meanwhile Marshall Allen is still playing shows at 98. Yes, ninety-eight. It ought not be possible but somehow it is. This seems to have been recorded last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M1Ndcy_ZQE
Ridiculous hogwash. Springsteen didn't "paint a target around his arrow." He is just insanely talented in a way that resonates with millions of people.
> Is it possible that Springsteen could have benefited from painting more of a target around some of those arrows?
The premise of this article is that Bruce "doubled-down" on his strength: song-writing. The life-lesson being that we should focus on our individual strengths instead of chasing someone else's strengths.
But I think Bruce just did his thing, and it happens to be that he was really-really good at it. I don't think he chose to focus on lyrics vs guitar skills or vocal skills. He just wrote songs and played guitar and sang --all to the best of his ability-- and it turned out that the sum of three was phenomenal.
The author is correct in his lesson. But Bruce is not an example of it. Instead, find a person who failed repeatedly while chasing something they were not great at, then found success after consciously switching gears and being more true to their own strengths.
> But Bruce is not an example of it. Instead, find a person who failed repeatedly while chasing something they were not great at, then found success after consciously switching gears and being more true to their own strengths.
It's weird because GPT is telling me this is exactly how Born to Run happened. Especially if you equate "something they were not great at" with "not having full creative control".
Not to beat a dead horse here, but I don't think Bruce thought to himself "You know, writing lyrics is actually what I'm best at... lemme focus on that this next time instead of all that other stuff!"
I was greeted by a massive newsletter banner before I could read a word. It’s for a guy who knows everything about success, apparently. The advice is predictably trite, in the way the horoscope usually is.
pedantic nitpicking: "People often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard to hit."
this makes no sense. the analogy doesn't really work, because no matter how many people are aiming, the difficulty to hit the bullseye is always the same.
well, it does work if interpreted that way, but i think it's not very elegant. something like "smaller slices of cake" would work better, or having to divide a jackpot between a higher number of players.
Guh. Springsteen is a great songwriter, great musician for a lot of reasons. Using him as a prop/example for the cheapest of cheap worthless nonsensical self-help garbage that doesn't even rate as an article or an original thought; not so cool.
That title is linkbait and therefore the submitter was correct to change it, according to the guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
They did an unusually tasteful job of finding a representative phrase from the article to serve as a better title. Well done!
Edit: oops - it was a mod that edited the title. But I didn't know that when I wrote the above :)
For me the difference is that "The key to becoming extraordinary" is just a garden-variety self-help blog title, whereas the Eno phrase is uncommon and thought-provoking.
Mysterious titles aren't necessary linkbait. Not everything should explain itself right away—that follows from the principle of curiosity—and we've always taken the position that it's good for readers to have to work a little.
Mysterious titles are linkbait from the user perspective.
> Mysterious titles aren't necessary linkbait. Not everything should explain itself right away—that follows from the principle of curiosity—and we've always taken the position that it's good for readers to have to work a little.
The HN guideline speaks against 'linkbait':
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
While it does not specify what 'linkbait' means, I believe the HN guideline wants links to be informative about their content. What else?
I think of linkbait as attention-grabbing mechanisms that take advantage of people's reflexes, cognitive biases, tendencies to get riled up, and so on.
Started reading this as it was vaguely intriguing but after a few sentences I was confronted by a "Enter your email to continue reading" dialog. It seems like the author has taken his own writing to heart. Unfortunately for the author, the arrow won't land again.
The line I reuse is, "Find a fundamental truth, then celebrate it"
Truth doesn't mean you cant polish and choose the best angle, but the truth must be there and exist today.
One of the classic examples is the Guiness dancing man. They literally celebrated how long it takes to pour a Guiness vs ignoring or tying to make out it's not that long. Brilliant marketing: https://youtu.be/69MpLiYhsXw