The Limits of Performance and the Universal Laws of Success

Once upon a time, while surfing the interweb, I was served a tweet recommending a book called The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. I knew the tweeter to be a thoughtful guy so I clicked the link.

Then, on the Amazon page, I saw Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, had given the book an endorsement. Anyone who follows Nassim will know that he is generous with his criticism and sparse with his praise.

I’d never heard of Barabási before or read any of his previous work. Which is to say, I had no direct experience of the quality of the man’s work. And yet, the combination of those two endorsements was somehow strong enough for me – I bought the book.

I belabor the details of my purchasing decision because it is just the kind of seemingly inscrutable process that Barabási tries to shed light on. Why did I buy the book? My interest in the subject matter was tickled, and the endorsements fueled my decision. In the case of this book, two recommendations were enough. But would one have sufficed?

Barabasi’s work tries to answer questions like this and others that seek to untangle the web of performance, quality and social cues on the outcomes we see in the world. Questions like:

What is the value of a single positive review?
How much does attending an Ivy League school contribute to one’s success?
Is a social media influencer who pays for followers wasting resources, or do they possess hidden knowledge?

In The Formula, Barabási distills his findings into five distinct “laws”:

Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

Previous success x fitness = future success.

While team success requires diversity and balance, a single strong individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.

With persistence, success can come at any time.

One of my favorite examples of these laws at work is the story of famed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his lesser-known collaborator, Al Diaz. Both were talented artists, but when objective measures of success were absent, the social network and external factors played a significant role in determining their respective levels of recognition.

The disparity of their success highlights the importance of networks and social connections when performance cannot be objectively measured. In the art world, where personal taste and subjective factors heavily influence success, it was Basquiat’s relationships and connections that ultimately propelled his career. He was able to forge connections with influential figures in the art scene, such as Andy Warhol and gallerist Annina Nosei, which significantly boosted his visibility and reputation.

On the other hand, Diaz, despite his talent, did not obtain the same level of access to influential networks. As a result, his career did not reach the same heights as Basquiat’s. This example underscores the first law in Barabási’s book: Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

In cases like Basquiat and Diaz, where there is no objective measure of success, an individual’s position in their network and the strength of their connections become critical factors in determining their achievements.

Diaz and Basquiat

Performance is a Rare Case

All of Barabási’s laws were intriguing, but for me, it is his second law that continues to assert itself as a valuable lens through which to examine our modern world.

The second law states that, performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

In essence, there are numerous fields where our performances are quite similar but our sucess is not.

In fact, one of the key insights from the book is that true performance measurement is more of a special case. It’s far more common to find competitions where performance can be measured, but to a limited and imperfect extent. But even in those rare cases where performance can be measured, the results we receive from them are highly dispersed (more on this later) and as soon as we move away from domains where performance can be measured precisely, things become fascinating rather quickly.

Barabási provides examples of wine tasting and classical piano competitions as areas where either performance is bounded, as in the case of piano competitions where everyone plays the piece flawlessly, or our ability to distinguish between performances is limited, as with wine tasting, where people can’t consistently agree on superior wines.

In the world of wine tasting, Barabási argues the evidence suggests that high-level performance is not possible to measure objectively. In fact, expert tasters consistently hold diverging opinions on the quality of a particular wine, leading to success being driven more by social factors such as reputation, networking, and marketing. In this case, the actual performance of a winemaker is often not the determinant of their success. He writes:

“It’s not as if the judges were ignorant amateurs – they are the top wine tasters of the world. Yet, in the face of such remarkable inconsistency, you may wonder how we can trust any of their opinions. Indeed, if these judges can’t agree with themselves, how can we expect them to agree with one another? In wine competitions, they don’t. In 2005, Robert Hodgson, a statistician at California State University, analyzed the results of sixteen major U.S. wine competitions and found that ‘the probability of winning a gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a gold medal at another competition.’ In other words, winning gold at one competition doesn’t increase your chance of winning a gold at another.”
Barabási, The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success

These are areas where our intuition tells us that performance should matter, and it does, but it doesn’t determine the winner. In such cases, we decide the winner based on other subjective criteria.

Success is Distinct from Performance

In our minds, success and performance should be linked, which is why we seldom differentiate between someone’s success and their performance. For Barabási, however, they are two very distinct and measurable concepts, each with its own unique properties.

Success is, by its nature, a social phenomenon, with its rewards contingent upon the dissemination and utilization of information among people. In the age of mass media and social networks, this as become an even more exponential phenomenon.

This distinction between performance which is linear and success wich is exponential aligns with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s framing of the transition from linear to exponential domains as moving from Mediocristan to Extremistan. As we move away from areas with objective performance measurement, the interplay between performance and networks becomes increasingly crucial.

Consider the example of tennis players from Barbasi’s research. Tennis offers a relatively objective measure of performance through rankings, win-loss records, and head-to-head matchups. However, even in such a performance-driven domain, success is often influenced by factors beyond raw skill or talent.

In the world of tennis, the unbounded nature of success can be uncovered by examining the economic rewards achieved by players. For instance, two tennis players with comparable rankings and performance levels might experience vastly different levels of economic rewards. One player may secure lucrative sponsorship deals, attract media attention, and have a strong fan base, resulting in substantial financial gains. This player’s success may be amplified by their marketability, charisma, or personal story, which resonates with fans and sponsors.

Barabási further shows that, even for tennis, a linear improvement in skill doesn’t necessarily yield a proportional increase in rewards. This implies that a player who may be merely 20% better than their counterpart can attain rewards that far surpass what the next best player obtains.

Moving away from tennis to areas where performance can’t be measured, success and social phenomena start to interac in even more powerful ways. These cases often exhibit self-reinforcing feedback loops or ‘preferential attachment’ to use the technical term (as seen with the Basquait example). Success enhances perceived performance, and perceived performance attracts more social success, further perpetuating the cycle. Hence why those people paying for followers may not be as sad and crazy as we think.

Extremistan and Mediocristan Implications for Career Choices

One key takeaway from the work of both Barabási and Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the need to remain cognizant of the landscape you are competing in. The world of Extremistan, where success is skewed and influenced by factors beyond performance, demands a particular kind of awareness. Thus, it is worthwhile to cultivate realistic expectations in these domains, as they present unique challenges that call for a nuanced understanding of what it truly means to succeed.

For example, in most service professions where local prominence is enough, such as plumbing, the competitive landscape is considerably more forgiving. Exceptional talent and luck are not the sole determining factors of success in such fields, allowing individuals to thrive on the merits of their work without facing the daunting pressures of global competition.

However, when one aspires to become a tennis star or an internationally acclaimed artist, the game changes. It becomes crucial to recognize the considerable role that exceptional talent and luck play in reaching the pinnacle of success in these areas – often, both are indispensable.

By understanding the nature of the field we play upon, we can establish appropriate goals and adopt the right mindset to traverse the path to success. Moreover, acknowledging the influence of luck and external factors can bolster resilience when confronted with challenges, and foster a sense of both gratitude and humility for any success achieved.

Fairness in a Social World

For me, the scarcity of true performance-driven success, and the distorting nature of social influence felt like a call to reconsider our conventional notions of fairness. Neoclassical economic notions of competition often lead us to naively assume that the world is fair and that the distribution of reward has at least a rough correlation with performance. But Barabási’s research seems to prove that in most cases this couldn’t be further from the truth. The policy implciations of this are, of course, broad and important but beyond the scope of this blog post.

I Recommend

The Formula is engaging and eminently readable. It delves into many other issues and investigations, some mentioned only briefly here or not at all. I add my recomendation to the pile.

Desire’s Second Derivative

There is a famous observation from the world of advertising, often attributed to marketing guru Theodore Levitt, that “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.”

This observation emphasized the need for marketers and businesses to understand and address the actual problems their customers are trying to solve, as this is what truly drives their purchasing decisions.

Today, it seems to me that the most winning products convince you not only that you will solve your problem but that you will want to solve your problem.

We want food that makes us hungry.

Lovers that make us want to have sex.

Entertainment that compels us to watch more.

Gyms that call us to exercise.

We are not after fulfillment but fulfilments second derivative – seeking a thing worth wanting whether or not it’s worth having.

Effortless Creativity and the End of Sharing Anxiety – The 3-Speed Creativity Strategy: Finding Balance in Your Creative Work

I recently spoke to a friend about whether she should continue her YouTube channel, which would be in addition to her 9-5 job. She said he wanted to keep it going, but it needed to be easy enough to make it enjoyable.

This resonated with me as I face a similar challenge with respect to blogging. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to try and write a post that meditates on how we can achieve a balance between ease and quality in our creative hobbies.

In the course of writing this, I’ve arrived at a strategy I call the 3-Speed Creativity framework, which I believe can be useful for ensuring our creative endeavors are both manageable and satisfying.

Two Approaches to Creating – The Perfectionist vs. Ad Libitum Approaches

When thinking about this problem, I found it useful to begin with the two distinct approaches that bookend the spectrum. On one hand, we have the perfectionist, who demands nothing less than flawlessness. On the other side, we have the ad libitum, who spits out their ideas with reckless abandon, like popcorn from a popper.

If we examine both extremes – their virtues and their pitfalls – we can gain a clearer understanding of what we want to keep and what we want to avoid as we navigate towards a more productive middle ground.

Perfectionists – The Long Slog

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
Robert Hughes

There are good psychological reasons for this perfectionist mentality. First, it ensures we don’t waste people’s time with half-baked ideas or lackluster experiences. Second, it minimizes the risk of later regret for publishing something that’s not up to snuff. Other benefits include higher quality output, greater attention to detail, a sense of professionalism, and the space required to achieve new levels of skill.

But the perfectionist approach also has some serious drawbacks. Most importantly, it often turns our hobbies into obstacles, robbing us of the joy of creation. As I mentioned in a previous post, The Sisyphus Matrix, climbing mountains is hard, but climbing mountains that feel like they lead nowhere is where we are likely to give up and abandon worthwhile goals.

Finally, our lofty standards often mean we don’t get the satisfaction of producing anything – inevitably most of our ideas remain locked in our heads, doing little good or harm.

Ad Libitum – The Quick Hit

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the approach of sharing our random thoughts and ideas as they occur to us (ad libitum). The pros of this are that we get near-instant satisfaction, rapid idea generation, flexibility, and spontaneity. Perhaps more importantly, in the age of social media, we get the chance to engage with others, build creative momentum, and in doing so, build a following.

Just as with the perfectionist approach, there are drawbacks to this mode of creation. We tend to value it less because it is, in a sense, the junk food of the creative impulse – a quick fix that doesn’t truly satisfy. We may even come to regret what we’ve made because it was produced thoughtlessly or simply because we see it as thoughtless by virtue of having been its casual author. Above all, the ad libitum approach can be unattractive long-term because it fails to push us to the limits of our abilities, to stretch who we are and what we can convey.

Having it All – A Strategy for Achieving Balance

As usual, the issue is that we want to have it all: the satisfaction of creating, the feedback from engaging with others, and the rewards that come from pushing ourselves to new limits of skill and expression, all without any amount of effort that resembles actual work.

The realist in me first jumps to the notion that we can’t, in fact, have it all, but after further consideration, I think we can, or at least we can have most of it.

The challenge is to design a coherent system that places each type of content within its own container and also links them together in a way that feels satisfying. This will entail finding ways to facilitate the difficult creative acts that we assign meaning to while also enjoying the rewards that come from easier mediums and methods of creating.

That is to say, we have to create a strategy for creating that recognizes both our need for quality and difficulty and the dopamine that comes from completing something and sharing it with the world on a regular cadence.

The 3-Speed Creativity Framework – A Productive Approach

The strategy that I propose is that organizing our work in terms of quality and communicating those categories to our audience is the most effective path to achieving a balance between our competing creative priorities.

To do this, first, I suggest categorizing output into three distinct types based on the effort, time, and polish we’re willing to invest. I’ll call these ‘Rapid Fire’, ‘Cruising Speed’, and ‘Deep Work’.

Below, I outline these three buckets and also include some thoughts on how you can signal to your audience that each represents a specific level of output:

Rapid-Fire: This type of content is all about getting your ideas out there quickly, with minimal effort and focuses on sharing thoughts and ideas without getting bogged down in the details or niceties of our own perfectionist tendencies. Spelling mistakes be damned! Design flaws be welcomed. More seriously though, to manage your audience’s expectations, consider using disclaimers or platforms that inherently signal a more informal approach.
Cruising Speed: This tier is for content that requires a moderate level of thought and effort but not so much that it overwhelms you. Think short essays, podcast episodes, newsletters, or themed social media posts. To convey this standard to your audience, you might adopt specific formats or templates that hint at a more structured approach while keeping things relatively light and breezy.
Deep Work: This should be reserved for projects that demand the highest level of effort, polish, and creativity. This category could encompass long-form articles, comprehensive YouTube videos, or in-depth guides. To signal that you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into these projects, promote them with some extra oomph and emphasize the time and resources you’ve invested.

Again, the strategy is designed to provide a framework that both helps manage creative anxiety and allows room for persona growth by categorizing projects into three distinct workspaces, with Rapid-Fire allievating the self-imposed pressure for perfection and Deep Work projects allowing room pushing the boundries of our existing skillsets.

Communicating Quality – The Hard Work of Reaching Out

Creating anything is, almost without exception, the act of reaching beyond ourselves and into the world, which is inexorably in itself a form of communication. As such, it’s easy to feel like the work we do when we make something should be sufficient – that we shouldn’t have to explain anything further beyond making what we want. I am guilty of this, full stop.

The problem with this mode of thinking is that it lays the path to a psychological sink-hole of creative anxiety. If the work must stand alone, and the work must speak for itself, then the work must be perfect, and since no work is ever perfect, we end up releasing no work.

This is why transparency and communication of your intentions with your audience are so important for implementing the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy. It gives permission both to your audience and to yourself to navigate the varying levels of quality in your creative output. This way, you can optimize and, dare I say it, even come to enjoy your creative work by reaping the rewards of both perfectionism and the ad-libitum approaches while minimizing their respective downsides.

Find media to platform fit – The Medium is The Message

While I strongly believe it’s worthwhile to ‘do the work’ to be more comfortable communicating your creative intentions with your audience, one final tactic that can help implement the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy is by simply matching your creative output and your intentions for it to the platform it’s shared on.

In keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s famous concept, “The Medium is the Message,” each social media platform carries its own culture and audience expectations. For example, Rapid-Fire content might vibe on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram stories, while Cruising Speed content could be the sweet spot for YouTube, podcasts, or a newsletter. For Deep Work, consider platforms that encourage in-depth exploration like Medium or YouTube.

By syncing your content to the most aligned platform, you won’t just optimize for audience engagement, you’ll also make it easier for your fans to recognize and appreciate the different levels of effort behind your work.

Easy, Light, and Fun

The ambition of this post and the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy is that by achieving clearer distinctions both externally and within ourselves across our work, we can build a sustainable and rewarding creative practice that provides space for personal growth, audience engagement, and ongoing inspiration.

If you’re already using something like this that’s worked for you. Leave a commment below and let me know what it is.

Tickets to the show – Feynman and the birth of the AI age, Sparks of AGI

In 1945, while Richard Feynman was a young physicist working on the Manhattan Project he and other scientists were invited to attend a test of the new weapon known as the Trinity test.

The scientists were situated about 20 miles away from the blast site at the base camp. They were instructed to wear welder’s goggles to protect their eyes from the intense flash of light caused by the explosion.

However, Feynman was curious and wanted to see the explosion without any filter. He came up with an idea to observe the blast through the windshield of a truck, knowing that the glass would absorb most of the harmful ultraviolet radiation.

As the bomb detonated, he watched in awe as the intense flash of light lit up the surroundings. He was one of the few people who saw the explosion directly without any protection.

Feynman later described the explosion as “a giant ball of yellow fire,” and he felt the heat from the explosion even from 20 miles away. In that moment, he realized the immense power of the atomic bomb and the potential devastation it could cause.

This was the advent of the atomic age. Something truly new in the history of human civilization.

How much would people have paid to be there?

If the recent sale of a pair of Michael Jordan’s basketball shoes for USD $2.2 million is any indication, we can assume the amount is a staggering figure.

The Birth Artificial General Intelligence and the AI Age

It’s with this in mind that I share the below video featuring Sebastian Bubeck a Microsoft employee and AI researcher which was the inspiration for this post.

Before watching this video, I counted myself among those skeptical as to whether the AI tools recent release actually qualified as intelligence. I, like many others who used the AI tools, found that they easily made mistakes that could be characterized as dumb from a human perspective. This in combination with pronouncements by prominent AI scientists about the limitations of these models, made me assume that these large language models were essentially fancy parrots, who would try their best to come up with something that sounded good without actually doing any deep reasoning.

But watching the below video and its illustrations in the jump of capabilities that has occurred from ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-4 has nearly convinced me that something truly profound has been created. Something that is reasoning or doing some type of effective approximation to it.

More specifically, the examples he provides of ChatGPT solving problems that involve creating representations of the world and correcting its mistakes are highly compelling.

Based on this video, my own naive opinion is that it seems increasingly likely that we are standing at the beginning of another historical transition point and unlike the atomic age which required top security clearance and a 20 mile exclusion zone, the tickets to the show are free.

Implicit versus explicit disruption, why AI will be more profound than The Bomb

One final point I think worth making is how much larger the impact of AI is likely to be than the atomic bomb. Or perhaps rather how explicit the impact will be in our day-to-day lives by comparison.

This is because atomic weapons have thankfully been mostly implicit (with the notable exception of the bombs dropped on Japan) weights on the balance of national power. They do not intrude on our daily lives. Which is not to say that they have had no impact but rather that it has been hidden.

This has been noted by many including the author Yuval Noah Harrari in his book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” Harari discusses how the threat of nuclear weapons, particularly during the Cold War, led to a sort of forced peace between superpowers. This, in turn, enabled cultural exchange and creativity to flourish, as nations were more focused on developing cultural, economic, and technological innovations instead of engaging in large-scale wars.

AI by contrast is likely to infiltrate our daily lives to a degree perhaps only matched by our mobile phones. We will use it while we drive, while we cook, while we game. Our children will have AI friends and teachers. And inevitably someday these children may ask us where we were when we first interacted with an AI. That is, if we are still referring to them as AI by that point.

Month: April 2023