# The Formula **Albert-László Barabási** | [[Strategy]]  --- > "Your success isn't about you and your performance. It's about us and how we perceive your performance." Success is the rewards we earn from the communities we belong to. These measures are external, not internal. Collective, not individual. If you want to understand how you'll ultimately be rewarded, you can't study your performance or accomplishments in isolation. You need to study your community and examine its response to your contributions. Network scientist Albert-László Barabási uses decades of research to decode the hidden patterns behind success. The finding: success is a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one. The Red Baron's legend wasn't about his actual combat record—the network found him useful and chose to amplify his success. Performance matters, but only when it can be measured. When it can't, networks take over. --- ## Core Ideas ### [[First Law: Performance vs Networks]] **Performance drives success, but when performance can't be measured, networks drive success.** The harder it is to measure performance, the less performance matters. Since there's no way to establish that one work of art is truly better than another, the network establishes value. Context matters when we assess worth. Social and professional networks—not geography—determine success. Performance needs to be empowered by opportunity. We need to reframe the assumption that aiming for the top means scraping our way up from the bottom. The single determinant of long-term success for students was derived from the best college they merely applied to, even if they didn't get in. It's performance and ambition—where you think you belong—that determines success. ### [[Second Law: Performance Is Bounded, Success Is Unbounded]] **Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.** Performance follows a bell curve. Height, intelligence, athletic ability—these decay exponentially as you depart from the average. It's exponentially rare to find outliers. Success follows a power law. Wealth, impact, visibility, audience, adoration—all have slowly decaying tails that allow for exceptionally large outcomes, extremes that would be impossible in a bell curve. Practice is important, and many people get close to perfection. Yet most don't get rewarded by becoming successful. As we near the upper bound of performance, it's simply not the deciding factor. Given how bounded performance is, if you can find small ways to stand out, it makes enormous sense to do so. **Exceptional reward only comes from talents that are easily and cheaply disseminated.** A performer must put out roughly the same effort whether ten or a thousand people show up. To be a superstar economically, your performance must scale. Scalability is necessary for power law distributions. Superstars are not outliers in terms of performance. Understanding this may rid us of the Tiger Woods effect, overcoming any sense of inferiority and increasing our odds of winning. ### [[Third Law: Previous Success × Fitness]] **Previous success × fitness = future success.** Preferential attachment tells us that the rich get richer, celebrity builds celebrity, and nothing succeeds like success. This is necessary and inevitable in achieving exceptional impact, reward, and visibility. Fitness and the rich-get-richer phenomenon don't clash—they're entangled, working together. But here's the deeply counterintuitive finding: the more ratings a product has, the more its final rating differs from its true fitness. The same is true on Amazon. The more people who weigh in, the less the result reflects true fitness. Popularity doesn't mean nearly as much about a product's fitness as we hope it does. Often it's the first reviews, unaffected by peers, that best capture true fitness. The stronger the social influence, the more unpredictable the outcome. **When a product has fitness and previous success, its long-term success is determined by fitness alone.** Social influence matters most at the start. Over the long term, quality prevails. Humans are inherently leery of risk, always looking for previous endorsement. Invisible early birds can play an alarmingly substantial role in the success or failure of a new project. To even the playing field, we need to recognise and champion talent early to set the snowball of achievement in motion. ### [[Fourth Law: Team Success vs Individual Credit]] **While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group's achievements.** When we handpick for talent, prioritising individual accomplishment over team achievement, we rarely get the results we hope for. Team members with high IQs didn't do any better on collective intelligence tests than their lower-IQ peers. Individual intelligence didn't seem to matter much in group performance. What did matter: how the team communicated. Teams tended to do well if individuals had higher-than-average ability to read emotional cues. Groups where a few people dominated the conversation had lower collective intelligence than those with more equality among members. Successful teams require balance and diversity. But they also need a leader. Trust someone to be in charge and build an expert, diverse support group around them. **Credit for teamwork isn't based on performance. Credit is based on perception.** Who gets the credit has nothing to do with who actually did the work. Credit decisions are often riddled with sexist and racist prejudices. ### [[Fifth Law: Persistence and Timing]] **With persistence, success can come at any time.** Whilst success melts like a snowflake, creativity has no expiration date. Your chance of success has little to do with your age. It's shaped by your willingness to try repeatedly for a breakthrough. Understanding the inherent randomness in every selection, we can better appreciate how success is often a numbers game. The good news: once you get that first win, the data shows you'll win again and again. Success can self-generate, growing in proportion to its size. --- ## Key Insights **Being honoured is an unreliable means to happiness, since it relies on the giver rather than the recipient.** Not a bad way to rephrase our definition of success. Success is a collective measure of how people respond to our performance, not an individual measure of what we achieved. **The Harvard Test was bogus.** Researchers told teachers that 20 per cent of first and second graders were "gifted" based on test scores. The scores were fabricated. But the 20 per cent labeled as gifted did indeed excel spectacularly by year's end. The perception of their hidden abilities created a self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in higher teacher expectation. Teachers expected brilliance, so they encouraged brilliance. Children responded by producing brilliance. Social influence is essential for human survival. Our judgements are cued by the views and experiences of those in our social orbit. We use peers' opinions to evaluate everything from ice cream to art. If a product is well liked, we assume it's superior. **One solid application: encourage independent decision making at your workplace.** Instead of a show of hands at the end of a meeting, have people vote privately via email on important issues. This reduces social influence and captures truer preferences. --- ## Connects To - [[Linked]] - Barabási's earlier work on network science underlies this entire book - [[Fooled by Randomness]] - Taleb's analysis of luck vs skill complements Barabási's bounded performance thesis - [[Range]] - Epstein on generalists vs specialists connects to the team diversity findings - [[The Fifth Discipline]] - Senge on systems thinking reinforces the network-driven success model --- ## Final Thought Performance is bounded by biology and physics. You can only get so good, and many people reach similar peaks. Success is unbounded—it follows power laws where a few capture exponential rewards whilst most get little. This asymmetry explains why working harder often doesn't work. The Formula reconciles performance and networks: **previous success × fitness = future success**. Early success triggers preferential attachment. But over the long term, fitness prevails. The implication: get visible early (networks drive initial success), then let quality compound (fitness drives enduring success). Credit for teamwork isn't based on performance but perception. This is uncomfortable but useful. If you're building something with a team, understand that one person will receive disproportionate credit regardless of actual contribution. If you're evaluating teams, resist the instinct to credit the visible leader and dig into who actually did the work. The most counterintuitive finding: popularity diverges from quality. The more ratings accumulate, the less they reflect true fitness. First reviews, unaffected by social influence, better capture what something actually is. This matters for choosing colleges, doctors, and candidates for office. Don't mistake consensus for quality. Success can come at any time if you persist. Creativity has no expiration date. Your odds improve with each attempt, not because you get better (performance is bounded) but because networks are stochastic. It's a numbers game with compounding returns once you break through.