This book is about "success". But it is not another common "success book" that either (a) so-called successful person tells his secret, or (b) a writer, consultant or analyst interviews bunch of successful people and extract the rules and science of success.
The author is a scientist who studies network science and is an expert of big data analysis (that is how I figured).
In this book, he tells you about the results of a series of their projects on "success", with unique approach of quantifying "success" with mining measurable data. Their approach revealed five laws of success, he says.
But "success" is a hard-to-define event. Just try to define success in general. You may have your success, but how do you measure and compare it among all others?
They tackle this tricky definition of success in many different fields from something easier (tennis and golf by contest scores, science measured by impact) to trickier ones (art). Some "success" are creatively defined, like how many google access the subject gets (=fame), or like in how many languages the wikipedia article appears (=outreach of the fame).
The five laws they extracted from their findings are;
1. Performance drives success, but when performance can't be measured, networks drive success.
2. Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.
3. Previous success x fitness [high potential]= future success.
4. While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group's achievements.
5. With persistence success can come at any time.
Interested? Then I suggest you to read this book.
I find the laws highly relevant to scientists. As a scientist myself, I did think the performance of scientists is similar to that of professional athletes. Like Einstein published his famous paper in age 26, high performance is achieved while young, and quality of the work diminish over age....that was what I thought, even with discounting the fact that theoretical fields of math and physics may quite be different from more physical fields of chemistry and biology.
But the law #5 refutes the notion, saying that a paper published later in life can be the "best one" for the scientist, which is personally quite encouraging.
In fact, all their analysis is done in an "in retrospect" manner (naturally), while we live our lives as ongoing events.
We do not always see ongoing event from a higher, "in retrospect" standpoint.
For example, my publication list currently shows 26 published papers. I have personal memories for each. But I don't really dwell on them. I just sent 27th manuscript and working on 28th.
I cannot tell which paper will be my "best" yet. I am actually thinking the 27th one I just sent (or the 28th in preparation) may become the best. Or perhaps, my 33rd paper would be a breakthrough? ...I guess I would have to keep going on to know that. Years later, in retrospect, an answer would emerge.
Greatest merit of such laws is that we can practice them. The law#5 kindly states that it may not be too late even if you are in some point of late in life.
This book may be interesting to you all, if you are interested in the subject of "success in life". It may take some thinking to apply the laws to your chosen field, though.
But the law #5 refutes the notion, saying that a paper published later in life can be the "best one" for the scientist, which is personally quite encouraging.
In fact, all their analysis is done in an "in retrospect" manner (naturally), while we live our lives as ongoing events.
We do not always see ongoing event from a higher, "in retrospect" standpoint.
For example, my publication list currently shows 26 published papers. I have personal memories for each. But I don't really dwell on them. I just sent 27th manuscript and working on 28th.
I cannot tell which paper will be my "best" yet. I am actually thinking the 27th one I just sent (or the 28th in preparation) may become the best. Or perhaps, my 33rd paper would be a breakthrough? ...I guess I would have to keep going on to know that. Years later, in retrospect, an answer would emerge.
Greatest merit of such laws is that we can practice them. The law#5 kindly states that it may not be too late even if you are in some point of late in life.
This book may be interesting to you all, if you are interested in the subject of "success in life". It may take some thinking to apply the laws to your chosen field, though.
