Six, and the art of staying in the game

In the summer of 2017, I squeezed into a packed hotel conference room at the Edinburgh Fringe to watch the opening of a new musical (on my now wife's brother's recommendation). Crammed alongside 90 others: most of whom were friends of the cast, the atmosphere felt more like a night at the darts than a theatre performance.

Cues were missed, the band were out of time for almost the entire performance, and the set was non-existent. Despite it being early afternoon, everyone was drunk: my abiding memory is of the saxophonist, utterly lost in the moment, giving it everything, and in doing so, drowning out most of the lyrics.

Yet despite the chaos, the energy and quality of what I heard was amazing. The songs were impossibly catchy, and every now and then I found myself desperately searching Spotify or YouTube to see if any had been recorded and released.

After a few years, I mostly forgot about it, until I spotted a poster for the show in London. Then New York. Six, the musical I’d barely heard over that saxophone, is now one of the most successful of the 21st century: nominated for five Olivier Awards, winner of the 2022 Tony for Best Original Score, and still running on Broadway and the West End.

Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow wrote it in ten days during Easter term at Cambridge. In those ten days, they didn’t just change their own lives, they created the kind of blockbuster success that countless artists, writers, and musicians spend lifetimes chasing.

It’s the maddening truth of creative success: effort has no relationship to outcome.

But this isn’t just a phenomenon of the arts: this kind of unpredictability now defines the entire economy.

As Rick Rubin puts it:

“Sometimes you make two things and think they're both the best things you’ve ever made. One of them connects with the world, and the other doesn’t - all we can do is put it out and hope for the best.”

Researcher Dror Poleg calls this a “non-linear” economy, where two products cost roughly the same to create, but one flops while the other earns millions. A song laboured over for months falls flat; a track written in 15 minutes defines a career. It might seem like an alien world, but Poleg believes it’s one we’ll all be living in soon.

Traditionally, this non-linear dynamic was confined to the creative industries. Film studios, publishing houses, and record labels spread their bets widely, knowing most projects will crash and burn. A graphic from the Penguin Random House antitrust case illustrates this stark reality.

But Poleg argues that today’s economy at large operates on the same principles. Intangible assets — not physical ones — now dominate (in 1975, 83% of S&P 500 assets were tangible; by 2020, that number had dropped to just 10%, likely even lower now).

The result, an economy built on intellectual property, where most things resemble the musical opening I stumbled into almost a decade ago: blockbuster or bust.

A cursory look at Terry Smith, superstar fund manager’s annual letter gives us a sense of what this looks like in practice.

Last year, nearly half of the S&P 500’s returns came from just five companies: Nvidia; Apple; Meta; Microsoft; and Amazon. In Germany, the non-linear economy is even starker: a single company, SAP, drove 41% of the DAX index’s returns.

It’s a trend that looks to have no signs of slowing, meaning that unless you’re doing a job that involves physical labour (pending no major robotics break-throughs), you’re ever more likely to find yourself a part of a non-linear economy.

Why does this matter? Because, unlike Six, creating a blockbuster rarely takes just ten days. For a more ordinary timeline, look to this year’s Grammy nominees.

Brat, the album that propelled Charli XCX to a new level of fame, is her fifth album, coming out ten years after her debut. Sabrina Carpenter is also a member of the fifth album club, whilst Chappell Roan’s debut album, released this year, includes tracks that were initially recorded nearly five years ago, before gaining any attention.

Three artists, whose music only reached wide audiences this year. The price paid: a combined 33 years of work.

This is the nature of a non-linear economy: years of work with little reward, until success arrives in a sudden breakthrough. It’s a sharp contrast to the steady, linear rewards of the 20th-century corporation — better job titles, more responsibilities, and incremental pay rises.

Anyone starting anything new already has a taste of this. Here’s Netflix founder Marc Randolph, sounding very much like Rick Rubin:

“Entrepreneurial progress is like geology: 99% happens in 1% of the time. Between breakthroughs, expect long periods of apparent stillness. Patience,”

Think of those who work for years to become experts in their field, invisible and uncelebrated, only for something unexpected — a war, a natural disaster — to propel them into the spotlight. In hours, their following skyrockets, they’re featured on TV, and their subscriber count explodes.

It’s the breakthrough moment that counts, but when it happens is near impossible to predict.

The challenge, then, is how to adapt. Thankfully, artists have long struggled with this, and we can learn from them.

Here’s the secret: in a world where effort and outcome are disconnected, the key is to optimise for staying in the game. Do what you’d be happy to do every day, even if no one ever recognised it.

When outcome is impossible to predict, the best strategy is volume. The more reps, the more experiments, the more shots on goal — the better the odds of a breakthrough. Not everything will land, but the only way to guarantee failure is to stop creating.

Sabrina Carpenter’s first five albums flopped, but she kept going because she loved making music.

Or take historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. They spent years writing history books, modest earners at best, until podcasting, a format that didn’t exist when they started, suddenly made them famous.

This mantra — that quality and outcome are distinct, and that’s fine — defines those who succeed in non-linear fields.

This is difficult, because we’ve been taught the opposite: to trade what we love for certainty and stability. The idea of following your dreams is often discouraged in Western society: doctor over singer, lawyer over painter.

That made sense in a linear economy, where a stable, predictable path was within reach. But when that economy retreats, if you don’t enjoy what you do every day and outcomes are uncertain, you risk doing nothing at all.

It’s a harder world, one in which failure is much more common. But I genuinely think most of us are up to it: because we’re already living it in some way at least.

Some of the things I write make it all across the internet. Tens of thousands of views, shared and reshared thousands of times. Others disappear without a trace. They all feel equally good to me.

I’m terrible at predicting what will land and what won’t, so I just keep writing and make it as good as I can. As for the outcome, I don’t really care. I just like writing.

This, I think, is what Moss and Marlow got right — it’s not just about habits or techniques, but a philosophy of work itself.

Focus on the act itself: whether it’s a new song, a play, or a wild idea for a musical about Henry VIII’s six wives, do the thing, and just get a tiny bit better each time.

Because in a world of blockbuster or bust, the only thing that matters is staying in the game.

aled@ashore.io

__

“Genuinely the only email I always open.” Once a week I write something about living creatively in an uncreative world. Join 3.5k+ others and subscribe to my email, Crossover Creativity, here.