but what is universal is that there is no upper limit on how much of it a superstar can earn. It’s unbounded.

But the engine that makes these hubs or superstars is preferential attachment—success breeds success.

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

That means that we have a better chance of successfully competing with superstars if we see them as unthreatening as they see us.

Not because they’re more creative during this burst of activity. They succeed because they try more often. It just so happens that for most

I beamed in astonished pride when the teacher praised me. I don’t think I was particularly gifted at physics, and I certainly wasn’t passionate about it yet. The only reason I’d earned a decent 80 percent score was because a friend of my parents’, an engineer, happened to be staying with us, and the night before the quiz he’d coached me through my

Instead, we need to bring the corner office or that prestigious gallery or that hoped-for interview closer to us.

And so, by analyzing the data differently, we discovered that fresh-faced thinkers disproportionately break through not because youth and creativity are intertwined. They do so because on the whole, they’re more productive. Undeterred by disinterest or failure, young people try again and again. That’s why scientists write most of their breakthrough

Taking all this in and thinking about the young artists I admired, I had every reason to be concerned, especially for my friend Botond Részegh, a Transylvanian artist whom I’ve known for over a decade. His fantastic illustrations helped tie together the science and history narratives in my previous book, Bursts, and I’ve long admired his paintings,