Creative Networks

The Matthew Effect refers to the long-term benefits of accumulated advantage.

Just as a high-yield savings account can generate compound interest (you earn interest on the money you put into said account, but also on that interest, all of which grows over time, yielding ever-more interest), so too can advantages compound to produce ever-more advantages over time.

So benefitting from early, high-end education can lead to more opportunities down the line—in part because of that education, but also because of the subsequent advantages gained from that knowledge, those connections, the prestige associated with one’s diploma, and so on.

Similarly, being famous can grant secondary benefits like money and notoriety, but can also allow one to skip steps when stepping into other fields: attaining publishing agents without having to persevere through the slush-pile, for instance, or starting a podcast with a million listeners from day one (not due to any particular skill with podcasting, but because of that preexisting fame).

In creative or innovation-oriented fields like painting and physics, one’s “scenius”—the benefits derived from being part of a strong community or scene, filled with people working in or adjacent to one’s field—can serve as a similar sort of amplifying variable, allowing folks connected to such scenes to grow and produce more (and more groundbreaking) work than comparably more skilled or knowledgable peers.

This exposure and belonging (and the cross-pollination it enables) can then provide outsized advantages because of the connections, notoriety, and so on derived from these relationships.

A physicist named Albert-László Barabási took this concept a step further, publishing a paper in 2018 that suggested belonging to a prestigious network in the world of fine art dramatically improves one’s chances of success in that field.

Using a model predicated on the idea that there’s a lock-in effect that favors the well-connected at the expense of comparable outsiders, he was able to predict which artists would experience success in the art world, and which would fail or flounder.

This finding, though based on just one bit of research, so take it with a grain of salt, suggests that all else being equal—so if we look at artists with comparable measures of performance and skill—their social networks, the people and entities with which they’re affiliated, are the most important metric of professional success.

This model also posits that, due to the amplifying strength of networks in this space, very small differences in an artist’s skill (compared to that of their peers) can provide outsized advantages (compared to having the same small advantage, but without the network to scale it up).

None of which implies it’s impossible to build a successful creative career as an outsider, lacking any such connections. But it does show that a person with connections—and someone willing to create and develop these types of relationships over time—will tend to have substantial advantages over those who do not or cannot.

And this would presumably apply to other fields as well, though perhaps to greater and lesser degrees, and almost certainly with different sorts of entities and people representing the in-groups that link a person with the right scenius and networks.