The Art of Manliness - #521： The 5 Universal Laws of Success

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.040 So ever since we were little kiddos, we've been told that talent and hard work pays off.

00:00:14.840 But as we've gone to adulthood, we've all seen instances where people who are equally

00:00:18.800 or even less talented than we are or even less hardworking than we are still got the

00:00:22.880 raise, the buzz, the promotion or the recognition that we so keenly wanted for ourselves can

00:00:27.580 make a man downright cynical.

00:00:29.320 Well, my guest today says that instead of getting jaded, you need to understand that

00:00:32.540 hard work and talent, while necessary, aren't sufficient for success.

00:00:36.300 His name is Albert Laszlo Barbashi, and he's a professor of network science and the author

00:00:39.980 of the book, The Formula, Universal Laws of Success.

00:00:42.900 We dig on our conversation discussing how Laszlo's work in network science helped him uncover the

00:00:46.820 hidden connections that lead to success.

00:00:48.800 Laszlo then explains the difference between performance and success and how it's possible

00:00:52.140 to be a high performer but not be successful.

00:00:55.020 We then dig into the five universal laws that Laszlo and his researchers have found that

00:00:58.880 cut across achievement of success in every field, along with practical takeaways, you

00:01:02.720 can start implementing in your life to experience more success yourself.

00:01:06.260 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash formula.

00:01:10.260 Laszlo joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:12.540 Albert Laszlo Barbashi, welcome to the show.

00:01:24.360 It's a pleasure to be here, Brad.

00:01:26.100 So you just recently published, not too long ago, a book called The Formula, The Universal

00:01:30.620 Laws of Success, The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail.

00:01:35.760 Now, the story of how this book came to be is really interesting because for a living, what

00:01:40.820 you've spent most of your career doing is studying complex networks.

00:01:45.280 In fact, you run the Center for Complex Network Research.

00:01:48.440 For those who aren't familiar with that, what exactly do you do there?

00:01:52.320 Sure.

00:01:52.940 So I'm a network scientist, officially, professor of network science, and we study all kinds

00:01:58.760 of networks.

00:01:59.460 And the reason we do so is because virtually all our social and biological existence depends

00:02:05.740 on networks.

00:02:06.520 You know, are we embedded in the social network and professional network?

00:02:10.340 All professional opportunities depend on access to the right network.

00:02:15.660 But even with our very biological existence depends on, let's say, chemical, biochemical

00:02:21.900 network within ourselves and genetic network within ourselves.

00:02:25.560 And our consciousness depends really on the wiring of our brain.

00:02:29.700 So we don't think often too much about it, but really the fact that we are alive and can

00:02:36.440 exist and do what we do is all depends on myriads of networks.

00:02:40.920 And network science aims to study and understand these type of networks.

00:02:45.600 So we study at the same time the biological networks, like genetic networks, but also the internet,

00:02:51.280 social networks, and eventually, in the last few years, networks that determine your success.

00:02:57.480 And how did that happen?

00:02:59.080 How did you go from looking at, say, a biological network, say, in our brain or within our genes,

00:03:05.000 to studying how successful people become successful?

00:03:08.400 Sure.

00:03:09.720 There are two ways of taking it.

00:03:11.480 One of them was really by an accident, which is I had a fabulous student who is now a professor

00:03:17.720 at Kellogg's Skillet Business at Northwestern.

00:03:19.980 But at that time, he was just coming off a project about disasters, that is, to try to

00:03:26.900 understand how people change their behavior when they experience some kind of disaster

00:03:32.140 in their neighborhood.

00:03:33.960 And we use mobile phones to track human behavior and try to understand whether we could detect

00:03:38.600 something odd happening in your neighborhood, just the way you behave and use your phone.

00:03:43.060 And it was a fabulous project, and we wrote a great paper about it, yet journal after journal

00:03:50.740 rejected the paper.

00:03:52.980 So one day, one of the students who was on the project, Das Jun Wang, came to me and said,

00:03:58.420 OK, what's next?

00:03:59.500 We're done with this, kind of.

00:04:01.800 What should be my next project?

00:04:03.380 And I said, what would you like to do?

00:04:05.460 And he said, whatever, but not another disaster.

00:04:09.060 And I kind of said, OK, well, how about success?

00:04:13.780 How about science of success?

00:04:16.040 And we kind of laughed about it, but then we looked at each other and said, hmm, this

00:04:21.100 is not such a bad idea.

00:04:22.860 And why wasn't such a bad idea?

00:04:25.140 Because we're network scientists, and we have spent quite a bit of time by then over a decade

00:04:29.740 looking at the structure of networks.

00:04:32.160 Well, we hardly ever asked the question how you, as a node, is experiencing the network

00:04:38.720 that you are part of, and whether the network will actually help you succeed in certain areas

00:04:44.840 or pull you back.

00:04:46.860 So kind of that night, from this kind of random direction or discussion, came a new subject of

00:04:54.880 study for us that is still ongoing in my lab.

00:04:57.140 How do we quantify success, what's the role in networks, and how do we really describe

00:05:03.560 performance and success in the language of science?

00:05:07.260 OK.

00:05:07.520 So yeah, basically, it's like, the question was like, tell me why, figure out why our paper

00:05:11.860 got rejected.

00:05:12.920 Why wasn't it a success?

00:05:14.780 Was the impetus.

00:05:16.340 Yeah.

00:05:16.780 OK, well, so let's talk about sort of typical, before we get into what you guys uncovered with

00:05:21.480 your research, let's talk about how people in general think about success.

00:05:25.000 Like, when you ask people, just on the street, or maybe a colleague, like, how do you become

00:05:31.100 a success?

00:05:31.860 What are some of the most common answers or assumptions that we have about that?

00:05:35.920 I'm so glad you asked that, because I was very surprised that when I went around and asked

00:05:42.200 people really that question, I realized that most people are really shy to talk about the

00:05:49.120 measures of success that the society considers success, from money to citations to visibility.

00:05:57.560 But they talk about their personal successes, like their pride in their children, the satisfaction

00:06:04.640 of achieving something in their life, of being where they are, and so on.

00:06:09.060 And we were at that time curious about how you quantify success, because anything we do

00:06:15.320 has to be quantified and measurable, and so on.

00:06:18.940 And for us, it was a big dilemma, how do we describe that?

00:06:23.120 And for us, actually, we realized that we have to make a very big distinction between performance,

00:06:29.000 which is what you do, and how you feel about what you do, and so on, and success.

00:06:34.040 And this is interesting that we have to distinguish that, because in the common language, they're

00:06:39.000 often used interchangeably, these two terms.

00:06:42.340 And we do so because we learn early on in school that performance leads to success, hence

00:06:49.360 if you are successful, you must have performance.

00:06:51.460 If you have performance, you will be successful.

00:06:54.100 But from a data perspective, we realize that these are very different quantities, because

00:06:58.440 performance is something that you do, how fast you run, what kind of research papers

00:07:03.900 you write, what kind of deals you put together as a businessman, what kind of paintings you

00:07:08.160 paint.

00:07:09.220 Success, however, is mostly about what does the community see from that performance, and

00:07:15.520 whether they acknowledge it or not, and whether they reward you, and how they reward you for

00:07:20.840 that.

00:07:21.160 In other words, your performance is about you, but your success is really about us, about

00:07:30.520 the community that acknowledges and rewards you for that performance.

00:07:35.620 Which, from a data perspective, was very interesting, because probably as we go on, we will realize

00:07:40.200 in this discussion that performance often is hard to measure, but success is easily measurable

00:07:47.200 because it reflects the community's opinion about you, hence there are multiple data points

00:07:54.060 about your success.

00:07:55.100 So, you can measure success in ways like, okay, number of citations a journal article

00:07:59.680 gets, for example, a number of books a book sells, the number of, I guess, time, I guess

00:08:05.360 nowadays, not albums sold, but downloads of a song.

00:08:09.080 Those are metrics of success you can measure.

00:08:11.400 Yes, and it's important to understand that there is not a single measure of success.

00:08:15.260 It's not just money, say, or fame, right?

00:08:18.680 But depending on what you do, there are different measures of success in the community.

00:08:22.760 As you said, for a scientist, that's impact, that is often measured in terms of citations.

00:08:28.440 For a musician, it's downloads, right?

00:08:30.920 Or how many people show up at the concert?

00:08:33.200 For an author, it's audience, how many people listen to them?

00:08:36.380 For a politician, it may actually be fame, you know, because that kind of translates into

00:08:41.180 votes and so on.

00:08:42.720 So, for each area, one has to find the right performance measure and the right success measure.

00:08:49.460 But one of the things I discuss in the formula is that despite the fact that there are multiple

00:08:54.540 measures of performance and multiple measures of success, fundamentally, the laws that describe

00:09:02.880 the relationship between performance and success are rather universal and apply to all different

00:09:08.860 areas.

00:09:09.960 Well, you give a great example in the book, just sort of showing the difference between

00:09:14.460 success and performance.

00:09:15.580 It comes from World War I.

00:09:16.700 Now, people are in America, they've probably had Red Baron pizza.

00:09:21.800 The Red Baron was this famous ace pilot during World War I.

00:09:25.500 People know about him today.

00:09:26.960 Snoopy made him famous in the Charlie Brown comic.

00:09:30.100 But you also, so there's someone who was successful because he performed well, but also people knew

00:09:34.200 him.

00:09:34.660 But you also highlight, there's also another World War I ace that had pretty much the same

00:09:40.580 performance level as the Red Baron, but no one knows about him.

00:09:43.840 Yes, indeed.

00:09:45.200 And that really kind of shows to me how kind of different success could be.

00:09:50.940 So indeed, the Red Baron, or Juan Ricofer, what was his name in the First World War, was

00:09:57.100 a very famous ace pilot who has had really every measure of success one can imagine.

00:10:03.820 And he is very well known to us because he holds officially the record number of planes shut

00:10:10.020 down, I believe in the vicinity of 80 or so.

00:10:13.100 And because of that, movies were written about him, books have been written about documentaries

00:10:19.960 and so on.

00:10:21.100 And he was a person who was not shy to hide his success.

00:10:25.860 It's called Red Baron because at a certain moment, he went against of the principle that

00:10:30.940 we have today in aviation to build planes that are invisible.

00:10:33.860 But instead, he painted his own airplane red.

00:10:37.900 So everyone knows that it's him and it's coming.

00:10:41.760 So what is interesting when you look at the data is that while he was on the German side,

00:10:46.820 on the Allied side, there was another person.

00:10:50.540 His name is Rene Falk, who was just as good at fights, actually, as himself.

00:10:57.220 Not only that, that he himself counts that about 120 planes that he shut down, which is much

00:11:04.280 higher than Rondi Koffer, about 70 have been confirmed and most likely he has actually shut

00:11:09.560 down more than the Red Baron.

00:11:11.820 But most importantly, he himself has never been shut down and never even be scratched by

00:11:18.180 a bullet, while the Red Baron has been shut down three times during his career.

00:11:23.540 And third time, he even lost his life in the battle.

00:11:27.480 So yet, all the movies are about the Red Baron and you hardly hear about Rene Falk.

00:11:34.780 And that's really the mystery of the formula.

00:11:37.420 This is one of the reasons I wrote the formula is for people and myself to understand why is

00:11:44.220 it that with virtually indistinguishable performance, some succeed and some are just

00:11:51.420 plainly forgotten.

00:11:53.120 Yeah.

00:11:53.660 And as I was reading that chapter, it made me think of there's some artists, writers

00:11:58.180 in particular, who their performance level was phenomenal at the time when they were alive.

00:12:03.320 Made me think of Herman Melville with Moby Dick.

00:12:05.580 We consider it a masterpiece now.

00:12:07.880 Same with The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald.

00:12:10.760 We consider them like, you know, masterpieces, great American novels.

00:12:14.220 But it was, that didn't happen until after they died.

00:12:17.640 Like, they didn't become a success the way you define it until after they died, even though

00:12:22.080 they masterfully wrote it when they were alive.

00:12:26.180 That's actually an interesting story.

00:12:28.580 And I probably didn't devote enough time in the formula.

00:12:32.980 Is this, the idea of posthumous success, right?

00:12:35.880 That people would recognize what I do when I, how great is what I do after I die.

00:12:40.940 And despite of all the examples that you mentioned, and I could add more, like Van Gogh

00:12:46.420 and Nietzsche, the data is pretty clear about it.

00:12:50.260 It's not common.

00:12:51.460 It's extremely rare that someone is recognized after their death.

00:12:57.360 What do I mean by that?

00:12:58.360 When you go back in the encyclopedia and you look at the people whom we admire and remember

00:13:04.980 today, and scientists have done that.

00:13:07.140 There's a so-called genius literature who focuses on that, mostly rooted in psychology.

00:13:12.860 What they realized is that 99% of the people whom we consider important for us today from

00:13:18.900 the past were very, very important to their contemporaries.

00:13:23.600 And they have gotten all the recognition that was possible at that moment of their career.

00:13:30.280 So, and so, you know, if you think from Michelangelo to, you know, Leonardo, from Beethoven to

00:13:37.480 Bach and others, they were revered in their times.

00:13:41.180 And there are very, very few, less than 1% of the individuals who were recognized after

00:13:47.200 their death.

00:13:48.360 But those 1% present such a powerful storyline for us that we end up writing most of our 0.93

00:13:55.900 books and most of our movies about them.

00:13:59.760 And therefore, they occupy a bigger space in our brain than those who really did not follow 0.96

00:14:05.160 that pattern.

00:14:05.760 So, if I look at the data, my recommendation to you and to your audience, if you want to

00:14:12.140 be successful, don't count on the next generation to recognize that.

00:14:17.100 Make sure that you follow the patterns that I described in the formula and get your recognition

00:14:22.860 why you can see it and enjoy it.

00:14:26.300 Well, so here's another question.

00:14:27.700 So, perception by the community is one of the necessary factors in order to be success.

00:14:33.540 That could lead people to the conclusion, well, if I just, if I'm just famous, if I'm known

00:14:38.700 by a lot of people, then I'm a success.

00:14:40.920 Is that necessarily the case?

00:14:43.200 Well, there are certain forms where fame is the goal.

00:14:47.900 And, you know, pretty much the celeb culture is really in that particular category.

00:14:53.080 And I know often people ditch the celeb culture to say, oh, all they do is they want to be famous

00:14:58.220 and they don't do really anything.

00:14:59.940 The truth is that those people work very, very hard to continue staying in the kind of

00:15:05.280 in the tension of the community or the world at large.

00:15:08.180 So, it's not so easy to continue doing that.

00:15:11.820 And perhaps the reason why we think less of them is because we don't perceive that they're

00:15:17.100 doing something good for the society.

00:15:19.380 So, it's for the sake of becoming famous.

00:15:23.020 That's what their activity for.

00:15:24.660 In most other areas, people who are famous, from Einstein to, let's say, Lady Gaga, they

00:15:32.540 became famous through some activity that they have done, some professional activity that

00:15:38.280 we as a community or as a society really appreciate.

00:15:42.200 So, there's this dictonomy, right, between that.

00:15:45.380 So, you can become famous for the sake of famousness or as a result of something good that you've

00:15:50.780 done for the society.

00:15:51.760 And as a value system, we obviously appreciate better of those who have just done their job

00:15:57.580 and then we recognize them and made them famous.

00:16:00.420 Well, that leads nicely to the first law of success you lay out.

00:16:03.060 What is the first law in the formula?

00:16:05.200 Sure.

00:16:05.980 The first law really kind of addresses the relationship between performance and success.

00:16:11.000 And it reads like that.

00:16:12.600 Performance drives success.

00:16:14.120 But when performance can't be measured, networks drive success.

00:16:19.540 And there's lots of information packed into that.

00:16:22.800 Because on one hand, it actually acknowledges the fact that in areas where performance is

00:16:28.400 measurable, then it determines success.

00:16:31.180 Unfortunately, there are very few areas where performance is accurately measurable.

00:16:35.780 Sports is one of them.

00:16:37.200 And perhaps investment is another one.

00:16:40.600 And what we have shown in my research lab and I discuss in the formula is the fact that

00:16:45.760 when really you can measure performance, like how fast you can run or whether you're winning

00:16:50.540 or losing your tennis games, then all measurable success quantities are purely derived from that

00:16:57.700 and they're predictable.

00:16:58.640 But the problem comes is that most people in this society live, work and live in areas where

00:17:06.180 performance is not as easily measurable as it is the case for a runner.

00:17:11.680 That is, we don't have a chronometer.

00:17:13.900 Whether you are teaching at the school or university or whether you're putting together deals for

00:17:18.540 a business or whether you have painting, you are in areas where performance is very,

00:17:23.380 very difficult to measure.

00:17:24.500 So then the question is, when performance is not measurable, what determines success?

00:17:31.960 And as I discussed in the first law, networks do.

00:17:35.920 So, and what are the implications of this law?

00:17:37.940 I mean, what can people do to, I don't know, guide their life or their career decisions knowing this law?

00:17:44.940 Sure.

00:17:45.620 So perhaps let's kind of pull out a little bit the network piece, right?

00:17:49.120 And one of the areas where performance is not measurable at all.

00:17:52.820 And as I discuss in the book, one area that is clear in that case is art.

00:17:57.880 Because is the microphone in front of me?

00:18:00.540 Is it a work of art or purely a microphone?

00:18:03.080 Well, in front of me, it's purely a microphone.

00:18:05.460 If you would see the same microphone on the pedestal exhibited in MoMA under a wide,

00:18:11.760 like transparent box, it would be an artwork.

00:18:15.040 So art is modern art or contemporary art is one of those areas where you cannot just look

00:18:20.180 at the object from in isolation from the art world and decide what is it worth.

00:18:25.100 Its worth is determined by who was the artist who put it out there?

00:18:29.360 What did the artist do before?

00:18:30.780 Where he or she was exhibited before?

00:18:32.700 What happened to him afterwards?

00:18:34.760 And what institutions were engaged with that artist?

00:18:37.700 And we have taken this to such an extreme that we mapped out the art world in the last four

00:18:42.860 years, every single artist's career.

00:18:44.980 And we were able to show that we can map out the invisible network that determines the success

00:18:51.240 in the art world.

00:18:52.400 And that network is extremely predictable, has extreme predictive power.

00:18:57.380 If you give me your favorite artist in the last five exhibits, I can fast forward his

00:19:02.460 or her career 20 years into the future and tell you whether he or she will make it or not.

00:19:07.760 Why is that?

00:19:08.960 Because art is one of those spaces where performance is impossible to measure and it's only the

00:19:14.560 network that determines the future success.

00:19:17.420 You have to engage with the network that determines the value in the art.

00:19:21.120 In the case of the art, those are the institutions, galleries, curators, and so on.

00:19:27.020 So coming back to the original question, what does that mean?

00:19:29.840 The first question I would ask, sit down and think to yourself, are you in a career path

00:19:35.380 where you have an objectively measurable performance?

00:19:38.680 And in that case, indeed, the key, the path to success is to improve your performance, run

00:19:44.080 faster, you know, make better deals and so on.

00:19:48.760 If, however, you are in an area where performance is not accurately measurable or not measurable

00:19:54.580 at all, then beyond a certain point, improving performance does not give you more results.

00:20:02.620 You need to start paying attention to those influence and power networks that determine success.

00:20:08.700 So does that mean you have to work on building up your network?

00:20:13.380 Yes, but it's not as simple as simply mindless networking.

00:20:17.040 And myself as a network scientist, it's kind of odd to say that's not what you should be

00:20:21.160 doing, networking.

00:20:21.940 What you need to do is to understand what is that network that determines success in your

00:20:28.500 area.

00:20:28.940 Like in the case of the art world, it's not the network between the artists.

00:20:33.680 The artists are totally relevant.

00:20:35.260 There are puppets in the show.

00:20:37.420 The network that really matters is the institutions, the curators, small curators, as well as the

00:20:43.060 galleries.

00:20:44.420 So just hanging around with lots of artists is not the path to success in the art world.

00:20:49.200 Kind of understanding these forces that determine how artists and artwork moves within the institutions

00:20:54.440 is the key.

00:20:55.760 And all areas have their own respective network.

00:20:59.440 We're in the process, for example, to start a project to map out the networks and the forces

00:21:06.120 that lead to entrepreneurial success.

00:21:08.700 And we already see the multiple networks that are important there from actually getting access

00:21:14.880 to the resources all the way to kind of getting funded, the people that you bring in your

00:21:21.100 company and so on.

00:21:22.800 So I'm giving this example and the art example to people understand that really there is no

00:21:29.100 one size fits all.

00:21:30.340 And depending on what you do, maybe a completely different network that is responsible.

00:21:34.380 The first step of the process, understand, map it mentally out, and then try to think,

00:21:40.320 what do you need to do to position yourself well within that network?

00:21:44.700 Well, let's go to your world, the world of academia.

00:21:46.820 Like what would be the network that you need to develop to say, get that paper published

00:21:50.720 that didn't get published?

00:21:52.500 Sure.

00:21:53.020 Actually, academia is somewhere between art and sciences because performance doesn't matter.

00:21:59.140 And why it doesn't matter is that if you and I actually write down the formula for,

00:22:04.640 let's say, predicting the success of tennis players, then the formula can be tested on

00:22:10.360 the data and the community can decide whether your formula or my formula is better.

00:22:15.960 And, you know, if yours is better, then you will actually carry the success and my formula

00:22:20.480 will be very quickly forgotten.

00:22:22.580 But networks are still important because not everything is worthwhile or it's possible to

00:22:28.520 study.

00:22:29.620 There are so-called disciplines and within disciplines, there are kind of, you know, breaking

00:22:34.420 areas and in a little bit, there's a community decision of what are the areas that really

00:22:41.620 we should be focusing on.

00:22:43.960 And you could get fabulous results in areas that no one really cares.

00:22:49.020 And therefore, really, you will not have an impact.

00:22:52.900 So in science, performance and networks together matter.

00:22:57.880 The networks determine what is worthwhile to explore.

00:23:00.680 And then within that area, there's a clear performance measure, whether your theory or

00:23:07.120 your formula or your prediction is better than mine.

00:23:10.200 Gotcha.

00:23:10.620 All right.

00:23:10.780 So to recap the first law, the first law is if an activity can be measured, performance

00:23:15.080 is going to matter.

00:23:15.960 But if it can't be measured, then the network is going to matter more.

00:23:19.240 Did I get that right?

00:23:19.760 Correct.

00:23:20.340 Okay.

00:23:20.800 So let's move on to the second law.

00:23:22.740 What is the second law on the formula?

00:23:24.020 The second law really talks about the fact that performance and success are very, very

00:23:29.600 different animals mathematically.

00:23:31.980 And it's formulated like that.

00:23:33.780 Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

00:23:37.400 But we need to unpack what that means.

00:23:40.520 So think about runners, right?

00:23:42.360 The runners are determined really, their performance is determined by their speed.

00:23:47.360 And we have a chronometer and we can measure it.

00:23:49.220 And of course, we know that the fastest man on earth is Usain Bolt.

00:23:53.720 What is interesting about him when I look at his performance is that when he wins a race,

00:24:00.100 he doesn't really win by outrunning significantly his competition.

00:24:05.160 He runs at most 1% faster than the loser of that particular competition.

00:24:11.620 And particularly when I look at his speed, he's not running 10 times faster than I do.

00:24:17.200 And trust me, I'm not a good runner at all.

00:24:21.120 So when we measure performance like speed of running or any other really objectively measurable

00:24:27.340 human performance, what we realize is that there are not a huge variability between the

00:24:33.100 performance of the individuals.

00:24:35.180 That is, the best is not really much, much better than the second best, but only slightly

00:24:40.700 better.

00:24:41.800 This has important consequences.

00:24:43.420 This is what we call that performance is bounded.

00:24:45.440 And one of the consequences is that no matter how good you are in terms of performance, you

00:24:52.160 will never be much better than your competition.

00:24:56.100 And there will be others who are so closely similar to you in performance that is almost

00:25:01.580 indistinguishable.

00:25:03.580 Now, put to that the other piece, the fact that in many areas, performance is not possible

00:25:08.800 to measure in an objective manner.

00:25:10.760 So now, if performance is bounded, and you can't even measure performance in an objective

00:25:16.220 way, it means that no matter what you do, you can count on that there are several people

00:25:21.100 who are indistinguishably good as you are at your job.

00:25:25.880 Now, this is not to say that we cannot distinguish good from bad.

00:25:28.860 Good singer from bad singer.

00:25:30.920 Good businessman from bad businessman.

00:25:33.180 But what is difficult is to do is to distinguish the good singer from the good singer, the good

00:25:38.300 one from the good one, and so on.

00:25:40.760 So performance is bounded.

00:25:42.620 And that's a humbling result because it really tells me that it doesn't matter what I do.

00:25:49.660 I cannot really be the absolute best in a measurable way at what I do.

00:25:53.700 I have to coexist with many others who are comparable to me.

00:25:57.040 But success is unbounded.

00:25:59.120 What does this mean?

00:26:00.060 It means that when we look at the success measures, how much money, the number one error

00:26:05.160 versus number two, how many citations the best scientist earns compared to the second

00:26:09.300 one, and so on, the differences are not tiny, but it can be orders of magnitude.

00:26:16.500 And indeed, this is kind of well known that the income distribution is not uniform, and

00:26:21.100 the top people actually are not just earning 1% more than the second one, but often a factor

00:26:27.880 of 10 could be the difference at the end.

00:26:31.060 So that's really what the second law tells us.

00:26:34.000 Performance is bounded.

00:26:35.380 That is very hard to distinguish those at the top.

00:26:38.180 But success is unbounded.

00:26:40.360 That is, the number one are not just slightly better rewarded, but often orders of magnitude

00:26:45.020 better rewarded than number two.

00:26:47.160 This goes to power laws, right?

00:26:49.680 Where you're talking about success is unbounded.

00:26:52.420 Correct.

00:26:52.860 So mathematically, it means that every time that we measure performance, it follows a

00:26:58.520 bounded distribution, like a Gaussian or exponential distribution.

00:27:02.660 But every time we measure performance, whether it's citations, non-downloads of songs, or

00:27:07.900 money aired, it follows a power law distribution.

00:27:11.020 In the economics literature, this is often called the Pareto's law from the 19th century

00:27:16.980 economists in Italy who realized the so-called 80-20% rule that 20% of the individuals earned

00:27:24.860 80% of the money at that time in Italy.

00:27:27.800 That is true even today, except it became more extreme, particularly in the US.

00:27:33.420 You know, like 80% of the money in the US is probably earned by the top 2-3% of the population.

00:27:38.560 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:27:42.520 And now back to the show.

00:27:44.480 So what's the takeaway from this?

00:27:45.840 Because it's going to be kind of depressing, right?

00:27:47.360 Because like, well, I'm just as good as that guy who's getting all the book sales and money.

00:27:52.540 Why am I not getting that?

00:27:53.820 Like, what do I need to do to compete with that guy?

00:27:56.460 Or can you even compete with that superstar who's at the top end of the power law? 0.98

00:28:00.880 Yes, you can.

00:28:01.860 And the key actually is to really understand that beyond a certain point, the competition

00:28:08.280 is not based on performance because those performance differences are not visible.

00:28:13.220 And then you need to pay attention to other effects, namely to the third law.

00:28:19.900 Okay, so what is the third law?

00:28:21.400 Of course.

00:28:22.760 So the third law is formulated like that.

00:28:25.280 Preview success times fitness equals future success.

00:28:29.480 So let's again and take it apart and what it means.

00:28:34.100 Preview, the law starts with simply saying success drives success.

00:28:39.180 That is, the more you have, the more you will get proportionate to what you already have.

00:28:43.140 I have discovered or encountered that this the first time about 20 years ago when we're

00:28:48.040 studying the world wide web.

00:28:50.260 And we try to understand why is it that certain web pages have millions of links, while the

00:28:55.640 vast majority of the web pages have a few dozen at most.

00:29:00.080 So what's the mechanism by which a certain web page like Google or Yahoo running away with

00:29:05.040 such an exception around number of links?

00:29:07.280 And we realize that mathematically to describe that, you have to assume that success leads

00:29:12.180 to success.

00:29:13.140 That is, the more links you have on the world wide web web page, the more you will get tomorrow.

00:29:17.980 The more friends you have, the more friends you will make tomorrow and so on.

00:29:21.780 And this is a very powerful law.

00:29:25.080 It's called in the scientific literature as preferential attachment, saying that effectively,

00:29:31.840 if you have more, you are preferentially chosen by the new who kind of tried to vote and again

00:29:36.800 for you.

00:29:37.300 But of course, if only rich gets richer, which is what preferential attachment says, the question

00:29:43.560 is, how do you become rich to get richer?

00:29:46.300 So what's the mechanism by which coming from behind, you could actually become that hub or

00:29:51.600 that very rich individual?

00:29:52.680 And that's where the fitness concept comes in.

00:29:57.120 The fitness is really telling us that nodes have different abilities or individuals have

00:30:02.500 different abilities to compete for success.

00:30:05.700 And once again, we discovered first in the case of the world wide web, trying to understand

00:30:10.740 how can a latecomer web page turn into the most connected page, like Facebook was a relatively

00:30:16.380 latecomer on the world wide web, yet within a few years after its appearance, it became

00:30:22.080 the single biggest hub of the world wide web, overcoming even Google.

00:30:27.940 And we realized that there is another concept, which is the fitness.

00:30:31.800 And once again, fitness is a collective measure that the community assigns to a particular

00:30:37.180 node or individual, and effectively tells you how much, how interesting you are for us.

00:30:43.400 Fitness is an individual tells you, if I meet you, do I want to keep your phone number?

00:30:49.500 Fitness is a web page tells me, if I go to your web page, do I want to save that link to

00:30:55.000 go back again?

00:30:55.740 And in all areas, there is a measure of fitness, and effectively describes the community's perception

00:31:03.360 of how useful that individual, that product, that web page is.

00:31:08.820 And the reason why fitness is important is because the reach gets richer phenomena is really

00:31:14.680 filtered to the fitness.

00:31:16.960 That is, visibility means that I can easily find you.

00:31:20.620 Well, once I find you, I make a decision if I want to know you and connect to you, and that's

00:31:24.920 determined on your fitness.

00:31:26.700 Hence, a low fitness, big note could actually lose or throw slower and lose its edge.

00:31:32.880 But if a high fitness note comes into the world wide web, it very fastly can acquire new links

00:31:40.480 and can overcome the earlier web pages, like Facebook has overcome Google.

00:31:46.060 So at the end, what we learn is that really, your success is determined by your previous success,

00:31:51.320 which is your visibility, how easy it is for me to find you, times your fitness is telling

00:31:56.860 me, once I find you, what is the likelihood that I will actually connect to you or work

00:32:02.900 with you?

00:32:03.880 Because that's interesting.

00:32:04.720 I like that distinction between fitness and visibility because that visibility factor can

00:32:10.500 be manipulated in unethical ways where you get lots of visibility really fast, right?

00:32:16.400 So there's examples of authors who will buy their books in bulk, right?

00:32:20.880 So they can get on the New York Times list.

00:32:22.820 But what you're saying, okay, that might give you visibility in the short term, but once

00:32:27.020 people start reading it, they actually find out, well, it's not a very good book, you're

00:32:30.500 not going to be as successful.

00:32:32.100 Absolutely.

00:32:32.740 And I'm glad you raised that example because we, in my lab, actually analyzed the book success.

00:32:37.960 We have purchased sales data from BookScan and we looked at decades long of what makes

00:32:43.560 a book successful and what doesn't.

00:32:45.740 And we actually do see books that are pushed up on the New York Times bestseller list.

00:32:51.240 That is when they appear there, they appear on the bestseller list and generally they sell

00:32:56.520 no more copies in the coming weeks whatsoever.

00:32:59.780 This is a traditional case of the situation that you described.

00:33:02.700 Very strong marketing and often purchase, massive purchases to kind of create the numbers to make

00:33:08.880 it the bestseller list.

00:33:10.000 But then when people actually get that book, they realize, no, I don't really want to read

00:33:15.580 that and they would not recommend it to anyone else, which actually is an interesting question

00:33:20.980 in terms of success.

00:33:22.520 Does the New York Times bestseller list or appearing there will help you sell books?

00:33:28.220 And actually, that's a very subtle question.

00:33:31.200 I discussed that in the formula that the answer is no.

00:33:34.860 Appearing on the New York Times bestseller list will not actually boost your sales.

00:33:42.340 For a vast majority of the books, at least it will not.

00:33:45.340 The only time it will do so, if you are a new time author and you've never been in a bestseller

00:33:50.500 list and for the first time appear there.

00:33:53.560 And then in that case, it acts kind of like a marketing tool that people will find about

00:33:58.880 your book about and then therefore they may by chance buy it.

00:34:02.720 In most cases, the New York Times bestseller list is not selling books.

00:34:06.520 It's simply reflecting the community's interest in your book.

00:34:10.300 In this chapter also, you talk about this.

00:34:14.180 What I've always found fascinating is the study and the research on the wisdom of crowds.

00:34:18.820 We have this idea because of the internet.

00:34:20.220 Well, the crowd, if you get them together, are going to come up with the best.

00:34:24.900 But there's a study you talk about in the book where, I think it was at Stanford, where

00:34:28.700 they looked at music downloads.

00:34:30.720 In one case, people, they couldn't see what other people were downloading.

00:34:35.240 And in that case, people typically rated the songs the same in quality.

00:34:39.120 But then once people could see what other people were downloading, what ended up being the most

00:34:43.760 popular downloaded song changed based on the particular group that they were in.

00:34:49.680 So there's a social network effect going on there.

00:34:53.940 Absolutely.

00:34:54.780 And this is very interesting because cultural markets can be very volatile.

00:34:59.320 And like books and music and so on.

00:35:01.980 And we often attribute to the variable quality.

00:35:04.680 But what this study has shown that was done by Matt Sagalnik and Duncan Watts at that time,

00:35:10.760 they were working at Yahoo, is that really the volatility is often not in the quality of the song,

00:35:17.100 but it is rather in the crowd effects.

00:35:21.220 And effectively, when people were not shown the ranking of the song,

00:35:26.800 and they were asked to rank songs just simply pure based on the performance,

00:35:31.000 they would come up with a relatively stable ranking that reflects the community's perception,

00:35:35.600 which is a good song.

00:35:36.880 But indeed, in the moment, they were actually shown of how many other people have liked that song.

00:35:43.900 Then the outcome became totally unpredictable.

00:35:46.960 So they had eight different parallel experiments that different groups of people ended up in the different rooms.

00:35:55.320 And the outcome of the eight experiments was drastically different.

00:35:59.120 And there was no agreement between the eight groups of which one is the best song.

00:36:04.320 What is interesting about it is that we live in a society

00:36:07.140 where we rely on other people's opinion in many of our decisions.

00:36:11.260 We go at Amazon and see how many people liked a particular product,

00:36:14.880 how many comments it has, and whether we try to go to a hotel,

00:36:19.480 we actually look at how many people liked that hotel and what kind of comments they gave.

00:36:23.880 And therefore, we are relying on the crowd to shortcut our decision process.

00:36:29.540 What this study shows is that the crowd decision is really not selecting quality

00:36:36.160 because there's a huge degree of volatility in the randomness of what the crowd sees first

00:36:43.480 and how they pick it up.

00:36:44.880 So, but what is also interesting about it is that if you are actually following the crowd's election process,

00:36:52.680 my colleagues were able to come up with formulas that can infer the true value of each of those objects,

00:37:00.240 whether it's songs or services or books.

00:37:03.980 So that, and tell us which one is truly the best.

00:37:08.200 And why is that important is because you can rank things when you have a store, for example, based on the popularity,

00:37:15.920 or you can rank things based on the true inner value of that that you infer from these formulas.

00:37:22.960 And what the data shows is that your customers are much more likely to make a purchase if the ranking is based on the quality than it is based on popularity.

00:37:34.460 Because partly they look at it, the ranking, and if they don't like what they see at the front, they walk away from it.

00:37:41.620 If you rank on the true quality that you can infer from this data, they very likely are going to like what they see on the top and they will make a purchase.

00:37:49.720 Okay, so the third law is success is visibility times fitness.

00:37:54.060 So fitness is performance, basically, whether you're good, you know, you can replicate it.

00:37:58.540 So like, what's the takeaway from that law?

00:37:59.820 So you said earlier, like, so how do you get, in order to be successful, you got to be successful.

00:38:04.920 Let's say there's a young entrepreneur or a young writer who's just starting out.

00:38:09.000 What can they do understanding that law?

00:38:11.340 Well, I mean, first of all, is number one is understanding that that mechanism takes place.

00:38:15.940 And then if you're completely novice, then the big question is how you get started, right?

00:38:21.560 And I discuss in the book several studies that show how important is that initial acknowledgement of what you do.

00:38:28.620 My favorite one, actually, is the Kickstarter study, where a colleague, a sociologist from Holland,

00:38:34.840 has gone and randomly picked 200 Kickstarter projects that no one has yet supported because they were brand new.

00:38:42.180 And grouped them into two groups randomly.

00:38:48.000 And for one of the groups, he actually gave them a little money proportionate to how much they were asking for.

00:38:53.520 And he simply ignored the other group.

00:38:56.240 And then he asked, how did the two groups do?

00:38:59.400 How did the projects in the two groups have done?

00:39:01.360 And what he found a month later is that the groups that he actually gave that initial tiny investment in have had a much, much higher chance of actually succeeding in collecting the money that they had compared to the random one.

00:39:16.880 Which was really odd because these were the groups were randomly decided.

00:39:21.100 So it's not that the group that he chose was any better than the group they didn't choose.

00:39:25.500 And this experiment and many other experiments he has shown, he has done, have shown how important is that initial endorsement.

00:39:34.820 Like, if you get the prize, you're much more likely to get further prize.

00:39:38.200 If you get the support from someone, you're much more likely to get further support.

00:39:42.760 In particular, people who are in the investment business, let's say startups, they know that very well.

00:39:46.680 Once a big name company or even not big name company comes and tries to invest into your company, lots of other investors will come by and say, I also want to do that.

00:39:57.000 The hardest is to get that very first investment, that very first endorsement.

00:40:02.060 And why is that first endorsement important?

00:40:04.540 The first prize is because we decision makers are very, very risk averse.

00:40:10.120 So if I have a choice between one that has been already endorsed and supported by people whom I trust and one that has never been, I'm much more likely going to choose the one that has been endorsed in others because I feel like I'm reducing my chance of failure by doing so.

00:40:26.300 So the challenge for a young interpreter and for a young person in anything, whether it's science or business or art, is that how you get that initial endorsement, how you get that initial attention, how you get that first award that will make you awardable in the future.

00:40:44.560 And I imagine it goes back to the first rule, building up your network in a smart way can help increase that chances that someone gives you that first endorsement.

00:40:52.440 Absolutely.

00:40:52.900 And you asked earlier, if performance is bounded, then what is it that I can do?

00:40:58.540 And if success drives success?

00:41:01.140 And the answer is to pay attention to these random things like this initial endorsement.

00:41:06.900 We have a tendency to say, well, you know, this endorsement will come naturally if I do good work.

00:41:13.260 And what the research is showing is that that's not necessarily so in how they distinguish the success from failure.

00:41:19.680 Okay, so let's move on to the fourth law because people hear, okay,

00:41:22.440 that first endorsement helps.

00:41:24.700 So one thing like a young academic or young writer will think was, if I just collaborate with someone who's bigger than me, that can help me.

00:41:32.240 But the fourth law says, maybe not.

00:41:35.600 Well, I mean, often collaboration and teamwork is not a choice.

00:41:40.020 We live in a society that most big tasks cannot be achieved alone.

00:41:43.620 You have to work with others to do so.

00:41:46.900 And when you work with others, there are two questions come up.

00:41:50.220 What's the right team to lead to success?

00:41:53.580 And the second one is, who gets the credit for the team's work?

00:41:58.080 And in the formula, I spent quite one chapter discussing really the research that came out in the last few years to understand what makes the good team.

00:42:09.620 But personally, I think the most important part of this law is not as much how you make a good team.

00:42:16.260 But once the team is there and they have achieved the work, and let's say that they successfully did so, who will walk away with the credit for it?

00:42:28.860 That is, will the person who came up with the idea, will the one who did most of the work, or perhaps the person who really came up with the Heureka moment and solved the problem?

00:42:41.500 Or maybe the promotion will go to the individual who made sure that the coffee is warm on the table at all times.

00:42:49.620 And the reason why this is an important question is because within the team, we understand who did what.

00:42:59.620 But the community outside of the team, the one who rewards you for the team's performance, often and typically has no clue about what was the role of each of the player.

00:43:11.140 And success is based on the perception, not on performance.

00:43:15.160 So, the success eventually and the reward will be determined of what the community perceives about who was responsible for the success of the team.

00:43:25.200 And this is not just kind of a theoretical discussion.

00:43:28.260 We have actually written an algorithm that looks at any research paper published in the scientific literature

00:43:35.660 and decides how much credit each of the author gets, independent of the order of the authors, or how many authors are in the paper.

00:43:46.180 And of course, we have that formula to tell you how much credit you get for the team's work.

00:43:50.740 But how do we know that we are right?

00:43:53.360 And to tell us that we are right, we went to areas where the community has already decided who gets the reward for that work,

00:44:02.240 and namely prizes, in a particular Nobel Prizes.

00:44:06.000 So, we've taken all the Nobel Prize winning papers.

00:44:09.060 Some of them had as many as 175 authors.

00:44:13.100 And we use our algorithm to decide who should get the Nobel Prize.

00:44:17.900 And in about 95% of the cases, we got it exactly right.

00:44:22.000 That the authors we picked are those who actually the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize for.

00:44:27.220 In a few cases, we were wrong.

00:44:30.380 And every time we were wrong, there was a juicy story behind that,

00:44:36.480 helping understand, really, the Paris of allocation of credit when it comes to team's work.

00:44:44.700 Just to give you an idea of how it works, you are hosting this podcast, I'm simply the guest.

00:44:52.460 If this podcast will be the most successful podcast that you've ever done,

00:44:56.880 and I'm sure it will be, then it's your credit, not mine.

00:45:02.300 Because you put together the podcast, you chose me as a person to interview,

00:45:08.180 you are asking the question and guiding this conversation.

00:45:11.600 Hence, rightly so, it will be your success if this particular show is well regarded by the community.

00:45:17.820 However, if you and I write a paper about network science,

00:45:23.140 and let's assume that you come up with the idea,

00:45:26.200 and let's assume that you decide to spend the next year in my lab

00:45:29.740 and work out that idea because you are so passionate about it.

00:45:34.300 The truth is that when the paper is published, it's going to be my paper.

00:45:38.580 And it's going to be my paper, not because I did anything in that,

00:45:42.640 but because you and I, being co-authors, you have no track record in network science.

00:45:47.600 And everybody who will read the paper will say,

00:45:49.860 oh, Laszlo has some other paper,

00:45:52.200 and here is Brad, who's actually helped him to make that a reality.

00:45:56.720 So the credit for a work doesn't really depend on who did what.

00:46:00.800 It depends on who is the person

00:46:03.000 whose previous and subsequent work most likely aligns with the team's success.

00:46:10.200 That is that, you know, like if you are a scientist,

00:46:13.840 and if you publish many, many papers in network science like I did,

00:46:17.200 and I will continue to do so,

00:46:19.060 you and I publishing a paper means that the credit mostly goes to me

00:46:22.540 because the community sees it as part of my intellectual journey.

00:46:26.760 So which means that really one can actually look at a potential collaboration

00:46:32.620 and decide even before the work has started,

00:46:35.820 whether if that work is successful, will I get credit for it or not?

00:46:41.540 And this is very interesting because we're not doing work only to get credit for it.

00:46:46.980 I engage in lots of team activities where I'm not there for credit.

00:46:52.280 I'm there just to make sure that that project is successful

00:46:55.440 because I deeply care about it.

00:46:58.020 But if the project that you're working on,

00:47:01.280 you do so because you would like to beg credit and acknowledgements

00:47:04.640 for your work in that project,

00:47:06.360 then you need to choose carefully,

00:47:09.080 making sure that indeed the project's outcome lines up

00:47:13.980 with your intellectual journey.

00:47:15.760 So what does this mean for like a young, say, an academic

00:47:18.800 who teams up with you?

00:47:21.680 They're like, I want to be a network scientist.

00:47:24.120 They're going to work on a paper with you,

00:47:25.480 but you're going to get all the credit.

00:47:26.700 How can they still benefit that from that collaboration with you

00:47:29.460 and get that visible success?

00:47:31.460 I am so glad that you asked that question

00:47:33.520 because I tell every student of mine

00:47:36.360 when we publish a great or not so great paper,

00:47:39.040 it doesn't matter together.

00:47:40.360 I tell them, congratulations.

00:47:43.060 Now your first or second or third publication out,

00:47:46.040 but you need to understand that this is not your paper, but my paper.

00:47:49.140 How will you change that?

00:47:52.000 Well, two things you need to do.

00:47:54.200 First, go out and speak at every possible venue,

00:47:57.560 conferences, workshops about this work,

00:47:59.760 so people will get to know you

00:48:01.700 and they slowly associate the results with you

00:48:04.680 and not with me whom they already know.

00:48:07.480 Second, and that even more important,

00:48:10.340 go ahead and publish a series of papers

00:48:12.340 on the same topic without me.

00:48:14.840 And with that, the credit will slowly shift to you.

00:48:19.260 I had, for example, my great student,

00:48:21.360 Marta, a postdoc, actually, Marta Gonzalez,

00:48:24.220 who worked for several years in my lab.

00:48:26.820 And together, we started working for the first time

00:48:29.840 on human mobility, using cell phone data

00:48:32.920 to understand how people move around

00:48:34.720 and what are the fundamental laws of human mobility.

00:48:38.120 But what Marta has done after leaving my lab

00:48:40.780 is that she moved to become a faculty at MIT. 0.67

00:48:43.960 And she ended up writing quite a number of fabulous papers

00:48:47.440 on the same topic.

00:48:49.480 And I personally stopped working on that.

00:48:52.180 So now, when the community would like an expert

00:48:54.740 on human mobility, no one thinks of me.

00:48:57.620 Everyone thinks of Marta.

00:48:59.420 She rightly so gets much of the credit for the joint work. 1.00

00:49:03.200 Okay, that's useful information.

00:49:04.120 So that can apply even if you're an academic

00:49:05.480 or a business person.

00:49:07.480 At some point, you have to differentiate yourself

00:49:09.160 and go off on your own.

00:49:10.620 Absolutely.

00:49:11.620 And it's really, the key is not necessarily to say,

00:49:14.760 well, you and I made a great business

00:49:16.480 and I'm now going to become a great singer

00:49:18.460 and I will get the credit for the joint business.

00:49:21.340 No, you have to continue working in the same area

00:49:24.260 and so that you can strengthen the credit

00:49:27.280 for the work that you've done alone.

00:49:29.340 All right, so let's move to the fifth law

00:49:31.100 because this came top of mind to me this week

00:49:34.340 because in the Atlantic, we'll talk about what it is,

00:49:37.060 but in the Atlantic, there was an article

00:49:38.560 talking about your professional decline

00:49:40.200 is coming much sooner than you think

00:49:42.180 by Arthur C. Brooks.

00:49:43.800 And he's saying that, yeah, you know,

00:49:45.220 you're going to have a lot of success

00:49:46.980 early on in your career

00:49:47.660 and then you reach the point

00:49:48.620 where you're not going to have much success.

00:49:50.540 The fifth law says, ah, maybe not so fast.

00:49:52.500 You can still have success

00:49:53.740 even later on in your career.

00:49:56.020 Well, I'm glad we get to talk about the fifth law

00:49:58.580 because this is really the favorite part

00:50:00.720 of the book for me.

00:50:02.440 Particularly so because I just passed 50

00:50:05.420 and based on all the previous research

00:50:08.320 on the topic of creativity,

00:50:11.100 the conclusion is clear.

00:50:13.280 I have really very limited chance

00:50:15.500 of overcoming my earlier work.

00:50:17.620 What do I mean by that?

00:50:19.140 There is a whole research in the genius literature

00:50:21.680 that looks at what age people

00:50:23.440 that we admire today have done their best work,

00:50:25.880 whether in 20s, 30s, or 40s, and 50s.

00:50:28.660 And the conclusion is pretty clear.

00:50:30.840 Notable individuals tend to do

00:50:32.680 the most important or career defining work

00:50:35.160 relatively early in their career.

00:50:37.500 This is so much so that Einstein once claimed

00:50:40.800 that if a person has not made his

00:50:43.360 or her major discovery by the age of 30,

00:50:46.420 he will never do so.

00:50:48.520 So a few years ago, we were curious,

00:50:50.660 is this only true for geniuses

00:50:52.280 or is it true for average individuals,

00:50:54.060 every scientist as well?

00:50:55.980 So we ended up reconstructing the career

00:50:58.580 of all scientists from 1900 till today,

00:51:02.000 finding out when they did their best work,

00:51:04.340 whether there was a Nobel Prize winning discovery

00:51:06.560 or something that no one remembers,

00:51:08.620 but it was the best of their own career.

00:51:11.820 And what we were surprised to find

00:51:14.140 that it turns out that people do their best,

00:51:16.980 personal best work relatively early in their career.

00:51:19.980 But one in line with the genius discovery.

00:51:23.680 And when we look more carefully at the data,

00:51:25.720 we realized that not only they do actually

00:51:27.780 most of their big discovery early in their career,

00:51:30.720 but they do most of the published work

00:51:33.380 relatively early in their career.

00:51:35.800 That is productivity changes

00:51:37.640 during the career of an individual

00:51:39.820 very high early on.

00:51:41.320 Young people try a lot, publish a lot, 1.00

00:51:43.500 paint lots of paintings, write lots of music.

00:51:46.060 And as they age, they do less and less of that.

00:51:49.200 And when we put productivity and success together,

00:51:51.540 we realized that really there is no age dependence

00:51:55.320 of creativity.

00:51:56.840 Rather, truly, what we learned is that

00:51:59.620 every single project in a person's career

00:52:01.900 has exactly the same probability

00:52:04.260 of becoming his or her most important work.

00:52:07.900 That is success or successful projects

00:52:10.440 are like lottery tickets,

00:52:12.380 that each of them has the same probability of winning.

00:52:16.480 But what it turns out is that most people

00:52:19.260 buy their lottery tickets

00:52:21.180 or do most of their projects relatively early

00:52:23.480 in their career.

00:52:24.780 And as time goes on, they try less and less.

00:52:27.820 So therefore, it appears as if people,

00:52:31.400 only young people can win the lottery 0.84

00:52:33.080 or only young people can be actually successful.

00:52:37.640 And this is, the data indicates

00:52:40.180 that this is not the case at all.

00:52:41.820 There is no age dependence,

00:52:43.120 which is fabulous news for me, obviously,

00:52:45.940 because it means that if I continue doing research,

00:52:49.000 I could still come up with a discovery

00:52:50.700 that would overshadow everything that I did until now.

00:52:54.420 And there are beautiful examples for that.

00:52:56.200 I discuss in the book the example of John Flann,

00:52:59.080 who was a chemist at Yale University

00:53:00.920 who was forcefully retired at 70

00:53:05.080 at the end of his career.

00:53:06.640 But he was not ready to give up.

00:53:08.920 So when they closed his lab down at Yale,

00:53:12.120 he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University.

00:53:14.820 And it is there in the new research lab

00:53:17.760 where he made the discovery

00:53:18.980 for which 15 years later, at age 85,

00:53:22.440 he received the Chemistry Nobel Prize.

00:53:25.860 So at the end, what we learned from this research

00:53:28.240 is that no, creativity has no age.

00:53:31.860 Productivity does.

00:53:33.300 People do tend to slow down,

00:53:36.040 mainly because aging,

00:53:38.720 partly because of family responsibilities,

00:53:41.300 often because other opportunities open up,

00:53:44.240 they become research administrators

00:53:46.280 or start running companies

00:53:47.600 that will take away from their initial expertise

00:53:50.480 and area of interest.

00:53:52.640 But creativity doesn't wait as long.

00:53:55.280 Those who actually continue doing it,

00:53:58.280 they could come up with their break to discovery

00:54:00.860 at any age of their career.

00:54:03.580 John Flann was 93 when he passed away.

00:54:06.940 And a few days before his death,

00:54:09.880 he was still in the lab working on the next paper.

00:54:12.560 All right, that gives me hope.

00:54:14.800 I like that.

00:54:15.820 So let's do a quick summary of this.

00:54:18.820 Sure.

00:54:19.620 First law is really about performance drives success,

00:54:23.520 but when performance can be measured,

00:54:26.080 networks drive success.

00:54:27.940 That is really that, you know,

00:54:29.600 you have to pay attention to your network

00:54:31.400 if your performance is not so distinguishable

00:54:34.080 from the other ones.

00:54:35.400 The second law says performance is bounded,

00:54:37.560 but success is unbounded,

00:54:39.020 which really says performance at the top

00:54:42.240 is very hard to distinguish,

00:54:44.260 but success is easily distinguishable.

00:54:47.580 The third law helps us understand

00:54:49.940 which of the high performance individuals

00:54:52.200 will succeed,

00:54:53.620 telling us that previous success times fitness

00:54:56.280 is the one that leads to future success,

00:54:58.920 and all measures of success from citations

00:55:01.620 to money to visibility follow that.

00:55:03.660 The fourth law talks about teamwork,

00:55:07.860 saying that while team success requires diversity

00:55:10.740 and balance,

00:55:12.180 a single individual will receive credit

00:55:14.420 for the group's achievement.

00:55:16.480 That is, credit really is assigned

00:55:18.400 based on perception

00:55:19.760 and not on what you did on the team,

00:55:21.860 and you need to manage that performance

00:55:23.440 if you would like,

00:55:24.480 or you need to manage that perception

00:55:26.620 if you would like to get credit

00:55:28.220 for the work you have done in the team setting.

00:55:30.380 And finally comes the fifth law,

00:55:33.080 said my favorite at this age of my career,

00:55:36.360 telling us with persistence,

00:55:38.380 success can come at any time.

00:55:41.280 I love this.

00:55:41.680 And what I love about this,

00:55:42.640 as you said about those conversations,

00:55:44.420 is there's sometimes not specific prescriptions

00:55:46.760 you can give on how to apply these things,

00:55:48.460 but as you said,

00:55:49.800 just understanding how this works

00:55:51.880 can start getting you to think about

00:55:53.700 how can I use this or apply this

00:55:55.880 in my specific career

00:55:57.700 or setting that I'm in.

00:55:59.080 Oh, absolutely.

00:56:00.960 I mean, even for me,

00:56:02.380 you know, writing this book

00:56:04.440 and organizing these laws

00:56:06.540 that were scattered in the literature

00:56:08.160 into multiple papers

00:56:10.020 and multiple texts

00:56:12.120 was really a game changer.

00:56:14.840 And not as much about my own success,

00:56:16.940 but I'm an educator.

00:56:18.240 So these days,

00:56:19.420 much of the advice I give

00:56:20.640 is not to myself,

00:56:21.660 but to my students

00:56:22.580 and to my postdocs

00:56:23.620 and other young individuals.

00:56:25.400 And I always invoke these laws.

00:56:28.500 It gave me the backbone

00:56:29.780 on which I can really give pertinent advice

00:56:31.960 to each of my trainees,

00:56:34.120 how to succeed,

00:56:35.500 what to do next in their career.

00:56:37.800 Well, Lazlo,

00:56:38.140 this has been a great conversation.

00:56:39.300 Is there some place people can go

00:56:40.260 to learn more about the book

00:56:41.200 and your work?

00:56:41.960 Absolutely.

00:56:42.700 So, I mean,

00:56:43.960 I would obviously start with the formula,

00:56:46.340 but there's also a website,

00:56:48.140 barabashi.com,

00:56:49.360 which is my personal website

00:56:50.960 or my lab's website

00:56:52.100 is connected to that.

00:56:53.100 And we also have

00:56:54.740 the formulabook.com

00:56:56.240 that has lots of content

00:56:57.960 related to the book.

00:56:59.520 And thanks for having me

00:57:00.560 on the show.

00:57:01.560 Lazlo,

00:57:01.820 thanks for coming on.

00:57:02.520 It's been a pleasure.

00:57:03.500 My pleasure.

00:57:04.160 Bye-bye then.

00:57:04.900 My guest today

00:57:05.380 was Albert Lazlo Barbashi.

00:57:06.720 He's the author of the book,

00:57:07.880 The Formula,

00:57:08.560 The Universal Laws of Success.

00:57:10.200 It's available on Amazon.com

00:57:11.500 and bookstores everywhere.

00:57:12.580 You can find more information

00:57:13.400 about his work

00:57:13.840 at his website.

00:57:14.700 It's spelled

00:57:15.160 B-A-R-A-B-A-S-I.com.

00:57:18.160 Learn more about his work.

00:57:19.000 Also, check out our show notes

00:57:20.000 at aom.is slash formula

00:57:21.940 where you can find links

00:57:22.580 to resources

00:57:23.120 where you can delve

00:57:23.580 deeper into this topic.

00:57:31.840 Well, that wraps up

00:57:32.800 another edition

00:57:33.380 of the AOM Podcast.

00:57:34.540 Check out our website

00:57:35.200 at artofmanliness.com

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00:57:36.820 our podcast archives.

00:57:38.100 There's over 500 episodes there

00:57:39.520 as well as thousands

00:57:40.380 of articles

00:57:40.920 written over the years

00:57:41.660 on success,

00:57:42.580 personal development,

00:57:43.500 personal finances,

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00:57:45.440 you name it,

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The Art of Manliness - July 01, 2019

#521： The 5 Universal Laws of Success

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