Tag Archives: success

On being successful

If you want to succeed in your career, it’s useful to study what it takes.

Albert-László Barabási’s book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success was published in 2018. The title sounds presumptuous. Can there be laws of success, much less universal ones? It turns out there’s much to learn from this book.

Barabási is a complex-networks researcher. He took his toolkit and applied it to the issue of performance and success, collaborating with others to produce a string of scientific papers. The Formula is a popular account of research on the topic.

To clarify: “success” here refers to careers and is measured by recognition and income, in other words fame and fortune. Success in other ways, for example being a good parent, being honest or helping others behind the scenes, is not covered because it is too hard to study mathematically.

Is this your idea of success?

A fundamental idea behind Barabási’s laws is that individual success derives from the community’s response to an individual’s performance, not from the performance itself. Barabási calls his five laws “universal,” but whether they apply outside the US requires further investigation. In any case, The Formula is fascinating. It is informative and engagingly written, and worth reading even if success in conventional terms is not your personal goal.

Performance and networks

The first law is “Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.” In some fields, for example chess and competitive individual sports, performance can be measured by observing who wins. If you want to succeed in chess, there’s no substitute for becoming a high-level performer.

In most fields, however, performance can’t be measured in a straightforward way. Barabási uses the example of art, giving examples of visual artists who are highly talented yet languish in relative obscurity because they exhibit only in local galleries. Artists who take the initiative to promote their work more widely then have opportunities for being exhibited in higher-profile venues, leading to ever more recognition.

Another example is the Mona Lisa. Did you ever wonder whether its fame is due to its unique artistic merit, or something else? Barabási tells how the Mona Lisa went from obscurity to world recognition.

The implication is that if you’re a very hard worker, willing to put in tens of thousands of hours of dedicated practice at your chosen craft, and willing to wait decades for recognition, then you have a chance in a field where performance can be measured. On the other hand, if you’re keen on networking and don’t want to work quite so hard, then pick a field where measuring performance involves a lot of subjectivity.

Success unbounded

Barabási cites a study of elite classical music competitions. In piano competitions, each player performs difficult works, some assigned, some their own choice. There might be a dozen expert judges, who make their assessments independently. Everything seems fair. However, the trouble is that in classical music performance, the standard is so very high that it’s hard to tell the players apart. The judges might actually choose in part according to who looks like a virtuoso. The differences between elite performers are so small that a break — for example, a competition prize — can launch someone on a solo career, while others of equal calibre are left behind.

            This is an example of Barabási’s second law, which is “Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.” Saying performance is bounded means that top performers, like the pianists, are all so good that it’s hard to tell their performances apart. But if you are the chosen one, getting a few lucky breaks, in particular endorsements from gatekeepers, then your fame and fortune can be enormous. Unbounded success like this comes only to a few, and it’s unfair, in the sense that so much depends on luck.

Think of the Olympic games. The gold medal winner in a popular event can become a household name. The silver medallist might be just a second slower but receives only a fraction of the glory and opportunities.

Success breeds success

Barabási’s third law is that previous success, combined with fitness, predicts future success. The academic term for success breeding success is “preferential attachment.” It has an amazingly strong influence.

One experiment involved people listening to unfamiliar pop songs. Members of one group of subjects gave ratings to each song without knowing what other group members thought of the same songs. In a different group, subjects were able to see the ratings of other listeners. The experimenters were tricky: they seeded the ratings, giving some songs a head start. These songs ended up being the most popular.

The message is that most people go along with the crowd. Their preferences are influenced by what others rate highly.

In academia, this is what’s going on when certain theories and theorists are favoured. If lots of researchers are citing Foucault, then the common assumption is that Foucault’s ideas are more incisive or fruitful — better than those of other theorists. There’s a good article about this sort of favouritism, titled “How to become a dominant French philosopher: the case of Jacques Derrida.”


Michel Foucault: a beneficiary of preferential attachment?

            Preferential attachment is important in business. A start-up known to have received funding is likely to receive more funding. One way to rig the system is to pretend your own money is from someone else, giving the impression of financial endorsement.

Because of preferential attachment, the first public rating of a product, for example a book on Amazon, is more likely to be an indication of its value. Later reviewers are likely to follow the crowd, so when a product has lots of ratings, its final rating deviates more from its fitness. So when you read a book, don’t read the endorsements first — judge it for yourself.


Judge for yourself: is this painting worth $100 million?

The team: who gets the credit for success?

Barabási’s fourth law is that when a team needs diversity and balance to succeed, an individual receives credit for the team’s achievements. Unfair!

Barabási has quite a few suggestions about how to make a team effective. He says, “Trust someone to be in charge and build an expert, diverse support group around him or her.” This is essential for breakthroughs. Top-rate individual team members are not enough, and can actually derail a group. “What matters is that people are offered opportunities to build rapport and contribute in equal measure.”

            There’s an obvious tension here between building a top team and the merit principle in recruitment. In hiring employees, selection is supposed to be on the basis of merit (though there are lots of deviations from this). But choosing on the basis of individual merit isn’t always the best way to develop a productive team, at least one that has autonomy and is expected to be innovative.

Barabási says that credit for teamwork is based on perception, not contribution, and that a single individual receives credit for team success. So if you’re an aspiring newcomer, part of a productive team, at some point you will need to venture out on your own. There are additional biases involved. Studies of academic economists show that men lose nothing by collaborating, but women gain little, and women who collaborate with men gain nothing at all.

Be persistent

Among mathematicians, there is a common belief that to make a great breakthrough, you have to be young. Some famous mathematicians, like Évariste Galois, made their mark when quite young. By age 35, you’re over the hill.


Galois

            Barabási’s fifth law challenges this belief. The law states that with persistence, success can come at any age. The key is persistence. Barabási found that young researchers are more productive: they write more articles each year. However, their articles written at older ages are just as likely to be breakthroughs. They are less likely to make breakthroughs at older ages because they aren’t trying as hard. (Maybe they become jaded or go into administration.)

Making a breakthrough is a matter of luck. You don’t know in advance which idea or project will be highly successful, so you just have to keep trying. For Barabási, this finding is encouraging. He’s getting older but now knows it’s worth persisting.


Albert-László Barabási

Should success be a goal?

For me, reading about Barabási’s “universal laws of success” raises the question of whether the conventional idea of success, as fame and fortune, is an appropriate goal. Who benefits from your success?

Surely you benefit from your own success. That’s obvious enough — or is it? Research shows that acquiring a lot of money is not a particularly promising way to increase happiness; other routes, such as physical activity, relationships, gratitude and optimism are more reliable for promoting happiness. Fame is not a reliable road to happiness, either. It can create some relationships but undermine others.

Some Olympic athletes fall into depression after they achieve their goal of a gold medal. Many athletes, and non-athletes, achieve more satisfaction from striving towards a goal than actually achieving it. As the saying goes, “There is no road to happiness; happiness is the road.”

Do others benefit from your success? That depends quite a lot. You might be very generous in helping and supporting others, using your skills and networks to assist those who are less fortunate. You might be a role model for others. On the other hand, you might have trampled over others in your efforts to get ahead, and become a heartless exploiter, continually on the lookout for challengers who must be crushed. Some business leaders are generous; others are better known for their ruthlessness and bullying.

Developing skills to a high level seems like a good thing. Surely it’s worth becoming an outstanding teacher or violinist. Again, it all depends. Some people with advanced skills, and who achieve success as a result, may be causing more harm than good. A soldier can become a highly skilled at killing. Is that good if it’s the bad guys are being killed or bad if the good guys are the target? A politician can become highly skilled at manipulating public perceptions. It might be for a higher cause or it might be just to obtain power.

The implication is that success alone is not necessarily a worthy goal. It can be better to have worthwhile goals, such as being ethical, enjoying life and helping others. If, in pursuing such goals, you achieve success, that’s just a little added bonus.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Are you lucky?

Luck plays a greater role in success than usually recognised.

 luck-skill

I’ve been lucky in my life. I was lucky to be born in an affluent society of loving and supportive parents. They were well off yet thrifty, and encouraged me in valuable habits. They started me on the clarinet, drove me to weekly private lessons and pushed me to practise daily for several years until I learned to love playing and was self-motivated. They encouraged me in reading and learning, but did not push me to get good grades in school.

I was even lucky when I was called up for military service and decided to leave the US for Australia. It was disruptive at the time, but caused me to rethink my views and led me to a lifetime of activism and research.

draft lottery

In my career I was lucky in getting some jobs and not getting others. Just after finishing my PhD, I applied for a lectureship at a new university and just missed out on what I thought would be an exciting opportunity. Decades later, I happened to talk to the physicist who got the job. He told me, “Brian, you’re so lucky you didn’t end up here!”

Most people’s lives are affected by chance events in many ways, large and small. Yet seldom is this factored into thinking about success and failure because, in meritocratic societies, the assumption is that success is due to talent and hard work and therefore justified.

These thoughts are stimulated by a new book by Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Frank is a prominent economist who has studied the implications of psychology for economics. His earlier books, such as Luxury Fever and The Winner-Take-All Society, are readable and insightful analyses of economic inefficiency caused by wasteful competition.

Success and Luck is part analysis and part personal testament. Frank describes playing tennis and experiencing an episode of sudden cardiac death, which has a 2% survival rate. Frank fully recovered, very much against the odds, because an ambulance happened to be nearby. That he was alive to write his latest book might be said to be a miracle, except that for a mathematically minded economist it was like winning a lottery in survival.

 Robert-H-Frank
Robert H Frank

The role of luck in success

Many successful people would rather not acknowledge the role of luck in what they have achieved in life. If what they have and do is due to their talent, drive and hard work, they can feel assured they deserve everything they have. If chance events were important, then perhaps other people, just as talented and hard working but less fortunate, deserve as much.

In academia, luck is involved in obtaining research grants. Much depends on the choice of assessors and on the individuals sitting on granting boards. When success rates are low, there are many good applications near the cut-off: those above the cut-off receive grants and those below do not.

research-grant-good-luck

            However, as a recipient of a major grant, it is natural to feel the grant is deserved – after all, a lot of work went into the application as well as into all the prior research – and to discount the role of luck. Losers might complain but winners are more likely to feel their award was justified. A grant success then leads to more opportunities to do research, and grants are treated by granting bodies as evidence of high performance, so a single award can lead to a cascade of further grants and research outcomes. Just a tiny bit of luck can make the difference between a stellar research trajectory and a solid but much lower profile career, or even a failure to make the grade as an academic. I’ve known quite a few brilliant scholars who, due to hostile supervisors, biased appointment committees or unsympathetic editors, never had a break and languished their entire careers without even obtaining a permanent position.

Winner-take-all

Frank’s previous studies of winner-take-all markets are relevant here. In the men’s 100-meter final in the 2016 Olympics, the difference between the first and the fourth-place finishers was  0.12 seconds, yet the rewards for the gold medallist, in terms of recognition and endorsements, are far greater than for finishers without medals. You could be fourth best in the world yet receive only a small fraction of the rewards for the first place finisher. Furthermore, you might have had a slower-than-usual start, and the gold-medallist a faster-than-usual start, that made all the difference. That is the potential role of luck.

Olympics 100m final 2016

            It used to be that most competitions for career success were localised. If you’re the best lawyer in town, you’ll get many more of the most lucrative cases. However, cheaper travel and communication mean you may now lose out to even better lawyers across the country. The market has expanded: you’re competing against a bigger field, and even a slight advantage can make a huge difference in outcomes.

Let’s say you’re a specialist in corporate mergers. A company worth billions of dollars wants to have the very best lawyers. Because of the huge sums at stake, even a slight advantage is worth paying for. So the salaries of the very best corporate-merger lawyers shoot through the roof.

merger-and-acquisitions

            This winner-take-all process, resulting from the breakdown of previous market barriers, is a prime driver of economic inequality. Frank has written previously of how this happens, and has recommended ways to counter it. In Success and Luck, he draws on this research to make the point that the larger the number of competitors, the more likely it is that luck will play a significant role in determining the winners.

To be clear: every one of the winners in these markets is talented and hard-working. The point is that others are just as talented and hard-working and only lose out due to bad luck. Frank provides tables showing that if outcomes are determined mainly by talent and hard work, with luck contributing only 2%, then when there are many competitors it becomes almost certain that the winner is very lucky and that there are others who are more talented and hard working but less lucky.

Motivation and luck

Frank points out that there can be advantages in discounting the role of luck: it can cause you to try harder. If you believe outcomes are due to hard work, you might be more willing to keep putting in the effort. On the other hand, if hard work isn’t enough and good luck is needed too, is it really worthwhile working quite as hard?

motivation

            A more important point made by Frank is that if the role of luck is recognised, it becomes more difficult to justify huge differentials in outcomes. If becoming a CEO is partly due to luck – in having the right parents, upbringing, education and opportunities – then why should a CEO have a salary dozens or hundreds of times greater than workers? Some rank-and-file workers, with the same opportunities, might have had what it takes to become a CEO.

Frank thinks that greater awareness of the role of luck may have a beneficial effect in moderating inequality. But there’s a problem. Winners benefit from the belief that their success is due to being superior and so will use their power and influence to help maintain this belief. I would like to believe in Frank’s view but I will wait to hear any leaders give a proper recognition of the role of luck and then try to justify huge levels of inequality.

Frank writes mainly of the US, where economic inequality is extreme, social mobility is limited and yet the belief that commitment and hard work can triumph over adversity remains almost sacred. In many other countries, for example in Western Europe, more generous welfare systems might be seen as recognition that those who are less well off deserve support.

It seems to me there is something different or deeper in the way US policies for disadvantaged people are so much harsher than in most other rich countries, something beyond a lack of recognition of the role of luck. Consider for example someone born with a serious intellectual disability. No one could imagine that such a person’s failure to advance in the meritocracy is anything other than bad luck. So how can a successful entrepreneur justify receiving more than the person with a disability? How does a belief in meritocracy address the issue of people with profound disabilities? This should be the source of cognitive dissonance, so the issue is hardly ever addressed.

meme-male-white-privilege

            Furthermore, anyone could, on any day, become seriously brain-damaged through an accident or stroke, largely as a matter of bad luck. This should be the basis for compassion and support for others, because it could just as easily be yourself.

Frank is tackling the issue of luck at the other end of the spectrum of capabilities, among those who are high achieving. But given that the impact of genetic luck is not seen as an issue for those with serious disabilities, Frank’s hope for change might seem forlorn. However, he found that after conversations about the role of luck, both liberals and conservatives could change their minds. Would they have changed their minds just as readily by raising the issue of serious disabilities?

The progressive consumption tax

In Success and Luck, Frank makes the case for a progressive consumption tax, an alternative to the usual income, goods and other taxes. He and others have been advocating this tax for years. Frank argues that it can painlessly provide the government with revenue to restore US infrastructure and enable people to have the resources to pursue their dreams.

Without going into the details of the tax, suffice to say that its apparent magic is based on addressing status races. As Frank explains, if every rich person has a car, house and wedding worth half as much, they will be just as happy because, in comparison to others, they are just as far ahead. Furthermore, for those who are well off, research shows that extra possessions give little or no extra happiness.

12_porsche911turbo2016

            Frank repeatedly uses a revealing example. Which would you rather have: a $150,000 Porsche 911 Turbo and well maintained roads to drive it on, or a $333,000 Ferrari F12 Berlinetta to be driven on roads with potholes? The point is that when public expenditure – on roads, education, health and much else – declines, private wealth cannot compensate.

Ferrari-F12-Berlinettapotholes

            Frank’s arguments are very good. The question is whether good arguments are enough to bring about a policy change, no matter how rational and socially beneficial for everyone. Frank says that public opinion can shift rapidly, as it has for example on same-sex marriage. As much as I would like to see a policy change that reverses the trend towards greater economic inequality, it seems to me that good ideas need to be taken up by social movements. At the moment the movements for equality need all the help they can get. So if you’ve had a fair bit of success in your life and are willing to accept that you had lucky breaks along the way, then perhaps one way of saying thanks is to join campaigns for greater equality.

A more radical position is the socialist principle of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Given that research on altruism shows that helping others can bring great personal satisfaction, often far more than personal achievement, it is possible to develop a rational argument for applying this principle. Wouldn’t the world be different if rational argument – and compassion – were the primary factors in decision-making?

Success-and-luck

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au