The Laws:

1. Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.
2. Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.
3. Previous Success X Fitness = Future Success
4. While team success requires diversity and balanced, a single individual will receive credit for the groups achievement.
5. With persistence success can come at any time.

The book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is an overview of the authors scientific research in the domain of the “Science of Success” which he studies at the Center for Complex Network Research in Boston.

The book opens with a discussion of success as measured in the context of World War I fighter pilots. The most famous of these was the Red Baron who fought for the German’s during the war. The Red Baron had a documented 80 won dog fights during the war and is recognized as one of the most successful pilots of that era, mentioned in papers, pizza’s, and snoopy cartoons by Charles Schulz. The Red Baron lost 3 battles, the last ending his life when he was 25 years old. The authors compare this to the success rate of Rene Fonck who fought for the French during the same period. Fonck claimed to have downed 127 German planes during the same period, with 75 of the planes being confirmed kills. Given that the French pilot appears much more successful on paper, what explains the difference in notoriety between the two pilots? From this question the authors extrapolate out definition of success that they use as the basis for the rest of the book.

Your success isn’t about you and your performance. It’s about us and how we perceive your performance.

The first law is examined first in the lens of the performance of professional tennis players citing research by Burcu Yucesoy. That research finds that the fame of professional tennis players, and interest in those players, is directly related to how well they are performing in professional tournaments. The author then pivots to the art world and begins with a comparision of Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the context of the SAMO graffati campaign. The two artists collabrated together on this successful campaign, but tracking their success of their careers Basquiat was wildly more successful than Diaz. The first law is posited as the answer to this question. Basquiat focused on building a network throughout his career and those relationships and his vast network helps dictate the subjective value, and fame, of his art.

The next sections of the book further examines success in the realms where performance cannot be measured. The second law draws a conclusion about the potential for growth of success versus performance and concludes that success can infinitely grow while performance cannot. This rule is examined in the context of how professionals judges evaluate competitors in the realm of fine wines. The research of Bob Hodgson in the context of the California State Fair Wine Competition. A blind taste test is performed and finds that professional wine tasters rate the same wines differently when re-introduced in the same competition. The insight is that the relative difference between quality wines is so small that the experienced professionals cannot discern the difference. The results of wine competitions determine the relative value (in terms of sales price) for different wines. However given the quality difference between the wines is so small, as demonstrated by Hodgson’s testing, consumers cannot conclude that an increase in price when comparing two wines neccesarily implies a significant difference in quality. He compares this to the work of Filippo Radicchi who examined Olympic records for sprinting and was able to predict record breaking performances. He concludes with comparing world-class Pianists and observes that those who make more visible effort when performing are more successful because it is difficult to objectively compare between the audio performances of two world-class performers. Instead the relative difference is decided by the observers who are taking in visual input to compare.

Superstarts like Tiger Woods and Power Laws. In the context of performance, if it is charted, it typically follows a bell curve - a bounded result. However when charting success it follows the a power law distribution, implying it is unbounded. The Tiger Woods Effect is also discussed.

Superstar supress you if you compete against them, but they may boost you if you cooperate with them.

The third law examines the phenomenon of preferential attachment and concludes ‘when fitness and social influence work in tandem, success has no boundaries.’ Preferential attachment ‘tells us that the rich get richer, celebrity builds celebrity, and nothing succeeds like success.’ In sociology it may be referred to as the Matthew effect. The practice of sock puppetting is discussed in detail in several contexts with the observation that it can ‘kickstart preferential attachment, launching projects on the path to success.’ An example is used examining the performance of J.K. Rowling’s book before and after it was revealed to be Rowling writing under a pen-name of Robert Galbraith.

The examination of the fourth law is interesting as it indicates that relationship to superstars can help up to a point, but to become a superstar (or recognized for your performance) at some stage an individual must try to stand alone. It also introduces strategies to maximize group success by introducing diversity of thought and balance. Team dynamics and group creativity are reviewed in the context of Brian Uzzi’s work.

The work of Sandy Pentland is discussed where an experiment was performed on call centers and it was shown that ‘face-to-face communication between team members mattered tremendously to team performance.’

Successful teams require balanced and diversity. But they also need a leader.

The above point is made in the examination of the jazz album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.

The fifth law recons with with quotable classic from physicist Albert Einstein who once said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” This was investigated by trying to identify scientists highest impact paper. The researchers were expecting to see that this paper was often done early in the career, but instead what they found was that their highest impact paper could be written at any point in the career. Each attempt at making a break-through had an equal chance - but it did seem that scientists earlier in their career were more productive, therefore because they made more attempts at a breakthrough the probability of a break-through paper was higher. This was a hopeful finding as it indicates that continued research later in life was still worthwhile as each new attempt had an equal probability of creating a breakthrough.