Previous success × fitness = future success.

and impact if you hope to make a difference in virtually any field. These success measures all have one thing in common: they are external, not internal; collective, not individual.

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

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

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

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

With persistence success can come at any time.

While the results are unequivocal that confidence and self-belief play a huge role in success, they have to match strong performance.

But if we come to competition assuming equal footing, we’re far more likely to succeed. Remember how Pierre Azoulay found that an