Copying last year's winner

A young man in Jeddah spends his evenings studying videos that did well.

He measures them. How long they ran, how fast the first cut came, which sound sat underneath, what time of day they appeared. There are people who sell this knowledge in neat guides, and he has bought a few. His own videos come out looking very much like the winners. They are tidy, correct and almost invisible.

It is a sensible plan on paper. If something won, copy what it did. Plenty of culture runs this way, every season borrowing the shape of whatever was loved the season before.

But look at what actually broke through, in almost any field, and very little of it fitted. The song people first called too slow. The street stall that sold one thing while its neighbours sold forty. The phrase that sounded clumsy until everyone was saying it. They were surprises, and the surprise is most of why they spread. No guide could have produced them, because the guides are written afterwards, by people describing the last surprise.

So copying the winners is mostly buying a ticket in a very crowded draw. Someone will win. With this many people holding the same ticket, the odds that it is him are thin, and the closer his work looks to everyone else's, the thinner they get.

The other path is slower and less exciting. Stop entering the draw at all. Find the small group of people he actually wants to help, delight or teach, and make something properly useful, or properly strange, for them.

That is not a lottery. It is the only bet where the odds improve as the work gets better.