CoursesCourse 17
The laws of success
Why do two people with almost the same ability end up with very different careers? This course separates performance, which is yours, from success, which is the verdict of a community, and follows what the data say about talent, luck, age, teams, credit, and the networks that decide who is noticed. It also says plainly which popular claims about success do not hold up.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Two words that are not the sameTwo street artists, one shared signature, very different lives. How to separate what you do from how the world answers, a tennis study in which the two line up, and an art world in which they do not.
- 2 Success has no ceilingThe fastest people on earth finish within a few hundredths of a second of each other; their rewards do not. Why success can be hundreds of times larger than the gap in performance, and what field experiments say about success breeding success.
- 3 Any time, at any ageA chemist forced to retire at seventy goes on to win a Nobel Prize. Why the best work in a career is as likely to come late as early, what a hot streak is, and what a model that multiplies idea by skill can and cannot say.
- 4 Teams, credit, and networksA paper with five thousand authors, and one Nobel prize that must go to at most three people. How teams work, how a community decides who deserves the credit, how networks of galleries decide who becomes a famous artist, and how far the ten rules can be trusted.
You’ll be able to
- Distinguish performance from success, and say where performance can be measured well enough to predict success and where it cannot.
- Explain why performance is bounded while success is not, and describe the experiments showing that early success breeds later success.
- Explain the evidence that the best work in a career can come at any age, what the Q-factor model claims, and what it cannot show.
- Explain how teams, credit, and networks shape who gets recognized, and judge how strong the evidence is for each of the ten claimed regularities.
About this course
This course covers 成功法则, a data-driven look at how success arises. Its starting point is a distinction that sounds small and is not: performance is what you do, and success is how a community notices, rewards, and remembers it. The source lectures set out ten claimed regularities, which they call laws, from the study of tennis, books, scientific careers, software teams, and the art market. They are not laws in the sense of physics, and we treat them as hypotheses of very different strength. It continues Course 16, Network science: the “rich get richer” mechanism and the weak ties of that course reappear here as accounts of how careers take off. Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, explains why we so readily read success as proof of merit, and Course 14, Chaos and emergence, supplies the idea that outcomes can be unpredictable even when the rules are simple.
What is ours is the checking and the context. Every number is traced to the original papers (several popular figures turned out to be wrong or overstated), the experiments are given with their sample sizes and their limits, and each lesson has an “Another view” section and a “Closer to home” section for readers in China and the United States. Success research suffers badly from survivorship bias, since we study the winners, and from data that come mostly from Western and English-language settings. We say so wherever it matters.