The Formula

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

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

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,

With persistence success can come at any time.

In other words, it’s performance and ambition—where she thinks she belongs—that determine your daughter’s success.

Realizing that success is a collective phenomenon throws that perception out the window. Once we defined success along external lines, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. We could measure and quantify it, using tools of scientific inquiry. And once we did that, we could unveil the laws that govern our success.

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

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

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

Previous success × fitness = future success.