Is There a Formula for Success?
I was looking through the ‘Writing’ tag that I follow on Medium and I saw an article titled ‘How to Stand Out in a Sea of Writers That Sound Exactly The Same’. The article ended with this line: ‘Want people to, you know, actually click on your articles and read them? Grab the headline vault here — 50+ headline ideas and templates you can use to write viral hits.’
It should be counterintuitive that something that claims to help you stand out advices that you follow a template (something that serves as a model for others to copy), but it’s not surprising. Articles about writing on Medium are very often about steps to becomes a successful writer on the platform. And it’s not only Medium. After seeing ad after ad for Skillshare, I looked through their courses and saw a number of them on similar lines — ‘Going Viral: Write, Film & Make Content People Share’ , ’Instagram Worthy Photography’, or ‘Learn the Basics and Sell your Artwork’.
Success, by definition, is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. So, I could choose that writing is the purpose in itself and I could succeed in writing a poem for example. But often, ‘how-to’ guides or courses offering success are not only telling people how to accomplish something, but also deciding for them what their purpose is. So we end up with specific templates or formulae of what success looks like.
On social media success could mean having X number of followers and a particular aesthetic that ensures people click on your content. And that’s why I deliberately say what success ‘looks like’ because the appeal of content becomes more important than what it contains. The formula for success could be different for different fields but with everything that is related to the market, ‘how to become successful’ is now more or less synonymous with ‘how to sell’.
The field of scientific research has escaped this narrow definition to a certain extent because if you don’t know what is going to be the outcome of an investigation, it’s very difficult to know to whom you are selling it to. Imagine a ‘how-to’ guide on successfully discovering a new particle. It’s absurd, because although there are approaches that might be better or worse, the existence of a particle is something we cannot decide on our own before it appears. There is a big gap between what is necessary for a research to succeed and a formula that you just apply. So a discovery doesn’t need a ‘catchy’ headline because there can’t be anything like it.
And perhaps we could take a leaf out of this approach and think — do we do things a certain way because it’s necessary for what we are doing, or because what we’re doing has to appear as ‘successful’ for the media? For example, do I need to add an image to a text because it will support and enrich what I’m saying or because a listicle told me that posts with images are more likely to be clicked on?
