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.

Do The Worst You Can

The thing that we learned, though, is that: every one of our films, when we start off, they suck.
– Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios

Do the worst you can.

We often poison our ambitions by comparing our first attempts to others finished products.

In doing so we fail to recognize that almost everything great started out bad. All masterpieces start as sketches, all films as rough drafts, all books as outlines.

Give yourself permission to do the worst you can and then make it better.

Don’t give up before you start.

P.S. Checkout this blog post about how the Oscar winning movie Toy Story’s early drafts were terrible.

Skill Changes Everything – How to Avoid Quitting Too Soon

“The problem with language is that it’s a little too facile, in so far as it leads us to believe that simply because we have words to describe our experience we actually know what those experiences are.”

– John Astin

Dr. Richard Davidson (Ritchie) was a young Harvard graduate student when he made the trip to India for his first ten-day intensive meditation retreat. The schedule called for nearly twelve hours a day of meditation. Ritchie quickly found that instead of focusing on his breath as he was supposed to, his attention was hijacked by a growing sensation of pain in his right knee. Over the course of the first day, this pain intensified and spread to his other knee and lower back. By the end of the day, Ritchie was on the verge of giving up on the retreat.

Ritchie persevered, in spite of the pain, and on the third day, as the instruction changed from breath observation to monitoring his body, Ritchie noticed a gradual shift in his perception. The ache in his knees and back morphed from being acute pain into a mere sensation. At the same time, he began to experience a profound sense of equanimity and well-being, it was as if he had somehow opened his mind.

This feeling of well-being persisted for the remainder of the retreat and by the end, Ritchie was able to sit for up to four hours at a time, even going back for additional meditation after already doing twelve hours. And though the intensity of the euphoria waned in the months that followed, his experience was so transformative that it convinced him to devote his academic career to the scientific study of meditation.

Why We Underestimate Change

Ritchie’s story illustrates an important lesson that applies to all skill based endeavors. Namely, that we consistently underestimate the dynamic nature of our own experience. More specifically, we fail to appreciate how profoundly our experience of a thing will change as we become more skilled. Cultivating an appreciation for this can help us make better decisions about when to stick with something and when to quit.

The reason we fail to account for the dynamism of our experience because we think in linear terms. For a sense of this, please humor me by answering these two questions:

Question 1: Do you like ice-cream, and will you like it in the future?

Question 2: Do you like running, and will you like it in the future?

Now, think for a moment, how did you answer those questions? Like me, you probably thought about your recent experiences of ice-cream or running, and with some minor adjustments, projected them forward.

We think this way because it’s useful for things like ice cream. Ice cream, like most things we do, is a largely static experience. Eating ice-cream in the future is going to be a lot like it was in the past (hopefully!).

But for endeavors that entail any degree of skill – think careers and hobbies – it is a counterproductive approach to forecasting what we’ll like and dislike. It’s counterproductive because when skill is involved our experience isn’t static. To the contrary, it is dynamic – it changes as our skills do.

How Skill Changes The Feels

We recognize that skill can account for differences in experiences between people doing the same thing. For example, imagine how it would feel to run a mile at your fastest pace.

And now, imagine what it would feel like for the world’s fastest miler Hicham El Guerrouj, to run a mile at his fastest pace.

It is, I think, intuitive that the experience of running a mile would be materially different for you then it would be for Guerrouj. And further, that it would likely be considerably more enjoyable for Guerrouj then it would be for you.

What’s less intuitive and more profound, is how our own experience of something can change through time, and specifically as our skill increases.

For a sense of this, now try to imagine how it would feel for you to run a mile after a year of dedicated training with the world’s greatest running coach…

I know, you’d still hate it, right? But it wouldn’t be the same as today would it?

It wouldn’t. Running the mile today would be a fundamentally different experience than running that mile after a year of training and coaching. Your breathing would be different, your stride would be different, your relationship to your whole body would be different.

Running, as you experience it, would undergo a transformation so profound that to speak of running today and running a year later as the same experience would be silly. You are doing the “same thing” but it is not the same experience.

That our own experience of the same thing can change so drastically is why endeavors that involve skill are a domain of life where our recent experiences are very poor predictors of what we’ll like and dislike in the future. This poses a challenge to the commonsense method of evaluating whether something is right for us, or not.

Traditionally, we assign a lot of weight to how something makes us feel today. Hence the saying, “You don’t know until you try”. The implication of a highly dynamic experience is that we not only don’t know until we try but we also don’t know until we’ve become proficient.

Linear Thinking’s Trap

The most common result of linear thinking is the error of quitting too early. Like Ritchie at the beginning of his meditation retreat, we allow ourselves to become anchored to our present experience and project it forward.

The reality, of course, is that generally speaking, as your skill increases the experience of something improves. Whether it’s because you win more, get paid more, or can express yourself more confidently, more skill leads to a better experience.

And we know this – that the beginning is usually the hardest part – at least intellectually. It’s the reason parents encourage their kids to get back on the bicycle when they fall off.

But as adults wrestling with more complex skills, it’s easy to lose this perspective and in its absence, every setback feels like a failure and what is really just the beginning seems like an eternity.

Thus, we fall into what psychologists term the fixed-mindset, an essentially linear perspective that assumes we’re either right for something or not. Once we’ve adopted this mindset, quitting becomes the seemingly rational decision.

Luckily, there is a simple and effective way to counteract our tendency towards fixed mindset thinking.

Recognize & Correct Linear Self-Talk

Among the first and most recognizable symptoms of fixed-mindset, linear thinking is our internal dialogue. We start telling ourselves things like:

“I’m no good at this.”

“I’m just not cut out to be a graphic designer.”

“I really don’t like tennis as much as I thought I would.”

And in this way, we begin convincing ourselves that we know what it’s like to do something when in the truth is we’ve barely scratched the surface the experience.

Personally, I’ve found that the easiest way to counter linear thinking is to make small modifications to this internal dialogue. When I catch myself saying, “I’m no good at this”, I change the sentence to “I’m no good at this, yet” or “I haven’t put in the work to be good at this yet.” And I still get to be pissed off at myself but in a more intelligent way.

Silly as it may first appear, these subtle shifts in language are often enough to remind ourselves that what we’re experiencing now is only a moment in a journey. That things not only can get better but they are in fact likely to, so long as we continue to put in the work to improve.

Where To Go From Here

A highly dynamic experience is in a way antithetical to our concept of self. After all, if what I like and don’t like is highly changeable, then who am I really? And so it’s not surprising that we’re not wired to fully appreciate our full range of possible experience.

But appreciating it may not be necessary. If we can just stop ourselves from falling victim to fixed mindset errors, then we at least retain the ability to push forward and allow the future to surprise us by being more interesting than we ever imagined it could be.

The Secret To Finding Work You Love – The ABP Criterion

Finding work we consider meaningful and enjoyable, in short, work we love, is one of the most important and difficult challenges we face. Important, because the majority of our waking lives are spent at work, and difficult because of the complete lack of attention devoted to the question by our educational system.

Indeed, given how much of our lives are spent working, consider how strange it is that you are infinitely more likely to spend a semester taking calculus, greek, or acting than you are seriously addressing how to go about finding what meaningful work means for you. In this absence of any coherent framework for addressing the problem, it’s no wonder that many people feel lost and depressed as they struggle to find the answer on their own.

The good news is that intelligent people have given the matter some serious thought, and there are tools you can use to dramatically increase your odds of success. Among the most powerful of these tools is a three word decision rule that, if used consistently, will naturally guide you towards work you truly love.[note]I came across the ABP criteria in a wonderful essay by entrepreneur Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/love.html[/note]

The rule goes like this:

A always

B be

P producing

And that’s it; Always Be Producing or ABP for short, is simply a way of saying that the true test of whether you’re making progress towards doing work you love is whether you’re producing.

For example, say you think you’d love to work as a Hollywood screenwriter. The Always be Producing (ABP) rule asks, are you consistently producing (or trying) to turn out screenplays? Or, if say you want to be fashion designer, are you expending time and effort towards creating production quality designs?

The ABP rule states that if the answer to those questions not an unequivocal yes – if you’re not consistently producing – then you’re not doing what it takes to find work that you love.