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What if making it in the music industry was just like playing a video game
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wouldn't make this whole thing a little bit easier? Well, this could be the cheat
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code you're looking for, and it's scientifically proven.
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Under my career and seen paralleled in many of the people around me, is the
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amount of emphasis we put on a single opportunity. Maybe
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you've landed a big playlist or sync placement, only to be disappointed by
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the minimal amount of traction you actually gained. Or
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a common example in the production and mixing realm would be working with an already
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established artist or hot new artist thinking it would be a big boost for your
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career. We expect a lot to come from these big opportunities, and
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when things don't line up with those expectations, we can get pretty knocked
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down. Trust me, I've felt it plenty of times. So what if we could
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reframe our approach to failure? What if we could take the weight off those opportunities
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in a way that would actually encourage us to keep playing the game? Enter
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the super Mario effect. The Super Mario
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effect is an idea that was put forth by a NASA scientist named Mark Rober.
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It's based on an experiment that he ran with 50,000 participants. The premise of
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the experiment is that he invited subscribers of his YouTube channel to play a game
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that he created. The game involved trying to move a car from the start of
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a maze to the end by arranging blocks of text that were
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simplified versions of computer code. Stuff like if square is
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blue, move forward, repeat two times. Stuff like that. The participants were
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told that they were part of an experiment to prove that anyone could learn to
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code, but in reality, they were part of an experiment to test how they
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reacted to failure. Each time someone attempted the puzzle incorrectly, they were
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prompted with a message. Half the participants received a message that said, that
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didn't work, please try again. The other half got that didn't
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work. You lost five points. You now have 195
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points. Please try again. The results were as you'd expect. People who were losing
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points with each failed attempt had a success rate of 52% for solving the puzzle,
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while people who were not losing points had a success rate of 68%, a
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total of 16 points higher. But the interesting revelation of the data is
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that participants who were losing points made fewer attempts to solve the
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puzzle. The average for that group was five attempts, while the other group tried an
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average of twelve times. That's more than double the number of attempts. This says
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a lot about how our perception of failure affects our willingness to try
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again. The negative connotation of losing points for each failed
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attempt discouraged those participants from wanting to continue.
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Does that sound familiar to those overweighted expectations we discussed earlier?
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So let's pause on the science experiment for a minute and talk about video games.
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As a child of the 80s who spent more than enough time in front of
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a Nintendo, this is very relatable to me, early video games were very much
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about learning what comes next. These days, things are a bit more randomized and complex.
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But in Super Mario, everything happened just as it was coded to happen. You
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knew where the bad guys were going to be. You knew what boxes had, what
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power ups, which pipes were secret passageways, etc. But only
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after you'd made it to that level before making it to a new level with
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only one life left was always super nerve wracking, right?
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You made it the furthest you'd ever been, but you only had one chance
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left before you had to start over.
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But if you didn't make it through, you wouldn't feel like a failure. You just
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feel that next time you'd for sure beat that level, because now you knew what
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to expect, right? You knew when to jump or duck, etc. You
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were excited for the challenge. So if we bring that idea back to mark Rober's
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experiment, the participants losing points became more concerned with their
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failure because of the fear of running out of points. On the other hand,
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the participants who were not penalized had a more gamified approach to their
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efforts. They were continuing on because they wanted to. Many of us in the music
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industry have a never give up attitude, myself included. In fact, on
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this podcast, I've even said that making it in this industry is a little bit
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like being the last person standing, right? Eventually you'll make it
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because other people will quit. Mark Rober offers an alternate
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perspective to that. He suggests that having a never give up
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attitude implies that we're actually working against our own desire
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to quit. Think about that for a second. Being focused on not quitting
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implies that you're actually doing something that you don't want to do. And that's
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not what we're doing. We're making music. We want to make music. So we should
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reframe our perception of failure to match that. So then what's the Super Mario
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effect look like for your career? It's just like those early video games. There are
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no crystal balls for a career. Nobody knows the outcome of their own
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journey. We can set our targets and plan our strategy, but ultimately, it's the
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experience of doing that we learn from, just like Super Mario. Until we
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reach the next level we won't know what to expect. You won't know if the
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TikTok strategy for your next single will work until you try it. You won't know
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if the lyrics of a song resonate with people until you play it, and you
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won't know if your new production or mixing technique will work until you put
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it into a track. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
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Every day we are learning something new about our journey and we should be
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using those insights to fuel our excitement to reach the next level. Like I mentioned,
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in the beginning, we have a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of the
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way that things are going. The act of failing often outweighs the experience
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gained by facing a challenge. Mark said that if we focus on the cool
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end goal, then the fear of failure is taken off the table and
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instead failure becomes an opportunity to gain the experience to make it to the
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next level.
