Month: January 2020

In The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, former physicist and current network scientist Albert-László Barabási describes these universal laws of success:  

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

THE SECOND LAW
Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

THE THIRD LAW
Previous success × fitness = future success.

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

THE FIFTH LAW
With persistence success can come at any time.

He applied rigorous mathematics to the question of what it takes to be considered “successful”, but is he right?  Let’s consider his assertions against one of most indisputably successful people of the last fifty years: Michael Jordan.

Perhaps we should begin by asking what it means to be successful in the first place.

George Bernard Shaw wrote : “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’.  When Robert F. Kennedy ran for president, the theme of his campaign was a paraphrase of Shaw’s line: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.”

At the dawn of a new decade, I dream of wondrous, ridiculous and impossible things.  I have no idea if any of it will happen.  I am not certain of what I can do to make any of it happen.  But why not?  What was incredible yesterday I take for granted today.

So I’ll work, I’ll hope and I’ll dream.  May the world we build together be better than the world that we were given.

Why not?