Inspired by the research and writing of Malcolm Gladwell, thoughts on artists who fail in talent shows but go on to earn greater success than the winner.
Jessie Buckley, talent television, and the quiet power of coming second
In 2009, a young Irish performer named Jessie Buckley appeared on a BBC talent show called I’d Do Anything?. Each week, millions watched as contestants sang, acted, survived eliminations, and edged closer to a single prize. The winner would be cast as Nancy in Oliver! in the West End. The logic of the programme was simple and reassuring. One person would win. Everyone else would lose.
Buckley came second.
Fast forward sixteen years and Buckley has just won a Golden Globe Award for her acting. The obvious question is why. Why does someone who did not win the contest so often end up winning the career? Why does second place, which looks like failure in the moment, turn out to be such a powerful position in retrospect?
To answer that, we need to rethink what talent shows are actually measuring.
Talent competitions are designed to reward immediacy. They favour people who can peak quickly, who read clearly on screen, who can be understood by an audience in under thirty seconds. This is not a flaw. It is simply the nature of television. The problem comes when we confuse success in that environment with success everywhere else.
Real careers are not built on immediacy. They are built on accumulation.
Psychologists who study near misses have found something counterintuitive. People who almost win often remain more motivated than those who actually do. The winner experiences closure. The runner-up experiences possibility. There is a lingering sense that something remains unfinished, and that sense can be galvanising.
Buckley left I’d Do Anything? with public recognition but without resolution. She was known, but not defined. That distinction matters. Winners of talent shows tend to be frozen in the image that helped them win. The audience voted for a specific version of them, and the industry is reluctant to let that version change. Runners-up, by contrast, are unfinished drafts. They are allowed to evolve.
There is also the matter of constraint. Winning brings certainty, and certainty brings restriction. Contracts are signed. Expectations are set. Momentum must be maintained at all costs. Coming second removes that pressure. It creates a rare and valuable condition. Time.
Time is the hidden variable in most success stories. Buckley had time to train, to take roles that were not obvious, to move between theatre, television, and film without being forced into a single lane. She was not required to justify her presence every six months with a new, louder performance. She could get better quietly.
If you look closely at her career, a pattern emerges. She gravitates towards complexity. Characters that resist easy sympathy. Stories that sit slightly askew. These are not choices that play well in mass-audience competitions, but they are precisely the choices that compound over time. Each role builds on the last, deepening her reputation rather than broadening it.
This points to a larger truth about how we misunderstand success. We assume that the best path is the most direct one. Win early. Be obvious. Eliminate uncertainty. But in many fields, especially creative ones, the opposite is true. Uncertainty creates room for experimentation. Experimentation leads to originality. Originality is what lasts.
The British cultural context matters here too. There is a long tradition of distrusting instant coronations. We are comfortable with the slow burn, the actor who arrives sideways, the sense that credibility must be earned gradually. Buckley’s trajectory fits that pattern perfectly. She did not announce herself as a finished product. She became one.
Seen this way, her Golden Globe does not redeem a loss. It confirms a process. Coming second was not a setback. It was a structural advantage.
Winning a talent show is a moment. Coming second can be a career. The lesson is not that failure is good, or that success is overrated. It is that the conditions under which we succeed matter as much as success itself. Sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is to finish just short of the finish line, with enough attention to open doors and enough freedom to choose which ones to walk through.
Almost, it turns out, is often exactly where you need to be.