The real relationship between your age and your chance of success

Backed by mathematical analysis, network theorist Albert-László Barabási explores the hidden mechanisms that drive success -- no matter your field -- and uncovers an intriguing connection between your age and your chance of making it big.

Today, actually, is
a very special day for me,

because it is my birthday.

(Applause)

And so, thanks to all of you
for joining the party.

(Laughter)

But every time you throw a party,
there's someone there to spoil it. Right?

(Laughter)

And I'm a physicist,

and this time I brought
another physicist along to do so.

His name is Albert Einstein --
also Albert -- and he's the one who said

that the person who has not made
his great contributions to science

by the age of 30

will never do so.

(Laughter)

Now, you don't need to check Wikipedia

that I'm beyond 30.

(Laughter)

So, effectively, what
he is telling me, and us,

is that when it comes to my science,

I'm deadwood.

Well, luckily, I had my share
of luck within my career.

Around age 28, I became
very interested in networks,

and a few years later, we managed
to publish a few key papers

that reported the discovery
of scale-free networks

and really gave birth to a new discipline
that we call network science today.

And if you really care about it,
you can get a PhD now in network science

in Budapest, in Boston,

and you can study it all over the world.

A few years later,

when I moved to Harvard
first as a sabbatical,

I became interested
in another type of network:

that time, the networks within ourselves,

how the genes and the proteins
and the metabolites link to each other

and how they connect to disease.

And that interest led
to a major explosion within medicine,

including the Network Medicine
Division at Harvard,

that has more than 300 researchers
who are using this perspective

to treat patients and develop new cures.

And a few years ago,

I thought that I would take
this idea of networks

and the expertise we had in networks

in a different area,

that is, to understand success.

And why did we do that?

Well, we thought that, to some degree,

our success is determined
by the networks we're part of --

that our networks can push us forward,
they can pull us back.

And I was curious if we could use
the knowledge and big data and expertise

where we develop the networks

to really quantify
how these things happen.

This is a result from that.

What you see here is a network
of galleries in museums

that connect to each other.

And through this map
that we mapped out last year,

we are able to predict very accurately
the success of an artist

if you give me the first five exhibits
that he or she had in their career.

Well, as we thought about success,

we realized that success
is not only about networks;

there are so many
other dimensions to that.

And one of the things
we need for success, obviously,

is performance.

So let's define what's the difference
between performance and success.

Well, performance is what you do:

how fast you run,
what kind of paintings you paint,

what kind of papers you publish.

However, in our working definition,

success is about what the community
notices from what you did,

from your performance:

How does it acknowledge it,
and how does it reward you for it?

In other terms,

your performance is about you,
but your success is about all of us.

And this was a very
important shift for us,

because the moment we defined success
as being a collective measure

that the community provides to us,

it became measurable,

because if it's in the community,
there are multiple data points about that.

So we go to school,
we exercise, we practice,

because we believe
that performance leads to success.

But the way we actually
started to explore,

we realized that performance and success
are very, very different animals

when it comes to
the mathematics of the problem.

And let me illustrate that.

So what you see here is
the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt.

And of course, he wins most of
the competitions that he enters.

And we know he's the fastest on earth
because we have a chronometer

to measure his speed.

Well, what is interesting about him
is that when he wins,

he doesn't do so by really significantly
outrunning his competition.

He's running at most a percent faster
than the one who loses the race.

And not only does he run only
one percent faster than the second one,

but he doesn't run
10 times faster than I do --

and I'm not a good runner,
trust me on that.

(Laughter)

And every time we are able
to measure performance,

we notice something very interesting;

that is, performance is bounded.

What it means is that there are
no huge variations in human performance.

It varies only in a narrow range,

and we do need the chronometer
to measure the differences.

This is not to say that we cannot
see the good from the best ones,

but the best ones
are very hard to distinguish.

And the problem with that
is that most of us work in areas

where we do not have a chronometer
to gauge our performance.

Alright, performance is bounded,

there are no huge differences between us
when it comes to our performance.

How about success?

Well, let's switch to
a different topic, like books.

One measure of success for writers is
how many people read your work.

And so when my previous book
came out in 2009,

I was in Europe talking with my editor,

and I was interested:
Who is the competition?

And I had some fabulous ones.

That week --

(Laughter)

Dan Brown came out with "The Lost Symbol,"

and "The Last Song" also came out,

Nicholas Sparks.

And when you just look at the list,

you realize, you know, performance-wise,
there's hardly any difference

between these books or mine.

Right?

So maybe if Nicholas Sparks's team
works a little harder,

he could easily be number one,

because it's almost by accident
who ended up at the top.

So I said, let's look at the numbers --
I'm a data person, right?

So let's see what were
the sales for Nicholas Sparks.

And it turns out that
that opening weekend,

Nicholas Sparks sold more than
a hundred thousand copies,

which is an amazing number.

You can actually get to the top
of the "New York Times" best-seller list

by selling 10,000 copies a week,

so he tenfold overcame
what he needed to be number one.

Yet he wasn't number one.

Why?

Because there was Dan Brown,
who sold 1.2 million copies that weekend.

(Laughter)

And the reason I like this number
is because it shows that, really,

when it comes to success, it's unbounded,

that the best doesn't only get
slightly more than the second best

but gets orders of magnitude more,

because success is a collective measure.

We give it to them, rather than
we earn it through our performance.

So one of things we realized is that
performance, what we do, is bounded,

but success, which is
collective, is unbounded,

which makes you wonder:

How do you get these
huge differences in success

when you have such tiny
differences in performance?

And recently, I published a book
that I devoted to that very question.

And they didn't give me enough time
to go over all of that,

so I'm going to go back
to the question of,

alright, you have success;
when should that appear?

So let's go back to the party spoiler
and ask ourselves:

Why did Einstein make
this ridiculous statement,

that only before 30
you could actually be creative?

Well, because he looked around himself
and he saw all these fabulous physicists

that created quantum mechanics
and modern physics,

and they were all in their 20s
and early 30s when they did so.

And it's not only him.

It's not only observational bias,

because there's actually
a whole field of genius research

that has documented the fact that,

if we look at the people
we admire from the past

and then look at what age
they made their biggest contribution,

whether that's music,
whether that's science,

whether that's engineering,

most of them tend to do so
in their 20s, 30s, early 40s at most.

But there's a problem
with this genius research.

Well, first of all, it created
the impression to us

that creativity equals youth,

which is painful, right?

(Laughter)

And it also has an observational bias,

because it only looks at geniuses
and doesn't look at ordinary scientists

and doesn't look at all of us and ask,

is it really true that creativity
vanishes as we age?

So that's exactly what we tried to do,

and this is important for that
to actually have references.

So let's look at an ordinary
scientist like myself,

and let's look at my career.

So what you see here is all the papers
that I've published

from my very first paper, in 1989;
I was still in Romania when I did so,

till kind of this year.

And vertically, you see
the impact of the paper,

that is, how many citations,

how many other papers
have been written that cited that work.

And when you look at that,

you see that my career
has roughly three different stages.

I had the first 10 years
where I had to work a lot

and I don't achieve much.

No one seems to care
about what I do, right?

There's hardly any impact.

(Laughter)

That time, I was doing material science,

and then I kind of discovered
for myself networks

and then started publishing in networks.

And that led from one high-impact
paper to the other one.

And it really felt good.
That was that stage of my career.

(Laughter)

So the question is,
what happens right now?

And we don't know, because there
hasn't been enough time passed yet

to actually figure out how much impact
those papers will get;

it takes time to acquire.

Well, when you look at the data,

it seems to be that Einstein,
the genius research, is right,

and I'm at that stage of my career.

(Laughter)

So we said, OK, let's figure out
how does this really happen,

first in science.

And in order not to have
the selection bias,

to look only at geniuses,

we ended up reconstructing the career
of every single scientist

from 1900 till today

and finding for all scientists
what was their personal best,

whether they got the Nobel Prize
or they never did,

or no one knows what they did,
even their personal best.

And that's what you see in this slide.

Each line is a career,

and when you have a light blue dot
on the top of that career,

it says that was their personal best.

And the question is,

when did they actually make
their biggest discovery?

To quantify that,

we look at what's the probability
that you make your biggest discovery,

let's say, one, two, three
or 10 years into your career?

We're not looking at real age.

We're looking at
what we call "academic age."

Your academic age starts
when you publish your first papers.

I know some of you are still babies.

(Laughter)

So let's look at the probability

that you publish
your highest-impact paper.

And what you see is, indeed,
the genius research is right.

Most scientists tend to publish
their highest-impact paper

in the first 10, 15 years in their career,

and it tanks after that.

It tanks so fast that I'm about --
I'm exactly 30 years into my career,

and the chance that I will publish a paper
that would have a higher impact

than anything that I did before

is less than one percent.

I am in that stage of my career,
according to this data.

But there's a problem with that.

We're not doing controls properly.

So the control would be,

what would a scientist look like
who makes random contribution to science?

Or what is the productivity
of the scientist?

When do they write papers?

So we measured the productivity,

and amazingly, the productivity,

your likelihood of writing a paper
in year one, 10 or 20 in your career,

is indistinguishable from the likelihood
of having the impact

in that part of your career.

And to make a long story short,

after lots of statistical tests,
there's only one explanation for that,

that really, the way we scientists work

is that every single paper we write,
every project we do,

has exactly the same chance
of being our personal best.

That is, discovery is like
a lottery ticket.

And the more lottery tickets we buy,

the higher our chances.

And it happens to be so

that most scientists buy
most of their lottery tickets

in the first 10, 15 years of their career,

and after that,
their productivity decreases.

They're not buying
any more lottery tickets.

So it looks as if
they would not be creative.

In reality, they stopped trying.

So when we actually put the data together,
the conclusion is very simple:

success can come at any time.

It could be your very first
or very last paper of your career.

It's totally random
in the space of the projects.

It is the productivity that changes.

Let me illustrate that.

Here is Frank Wilczek,
who got the Nobel Prize in Physics

for the very first paper he ever wrote
in his career as a graduate student.

(Laughter)

More interesting is John Fenn,

who, at age 70, was forcefully retired
by Yale University.

They shut his lab down,

and at that moment, he moved
to Virginia Commonwealth University,

opened another lab,

and it is there, at age 72,
that he published a paper

for which, 15 years later, he got
the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

And you think, OK,
well, science is special,

but what about other areas
where we need to be creative?

So let me take another
typical example: entrepreneurship.

Silicon Valley,

the land of the youth, right?

And indeed, when you look at it,

you realize that the biggest awards,
the TechCrunch Awards and other awards,

are all going to people

whose average age
is late 20s, very early 30s.

You look at who the VCs give the money to,
some of the biggest VC firms --

all people in their early 30s.

Which, of course, we know;

there is this ethos in Silicon Valley
that youth equals success.

Not when you look at the data,

because it's not only
about forming a company --

forming a company is like productivity,
trying, trying, trying --

when you look at which
of these individuals actually put out

a successful company, a successful exit.

And recently, some of our colleagues
looked at exactly that question.

And it turns out that yes,
those in the 20s and 30s

put out a huge number of companies,
form lots of companies,

but most of them go bust.

And when you look at the successful exits,
what you see in this particular plot,

the older you are, the more likely that
you will actually hit the stock market

or the sell the company successfully.

This is so strong, actually,
that if you are in the 50s,

you are twice as likely
to actually have a successful exit

than if you are in your 30s.

(Applause)

So in the end, what is it
that we see, actually?

What we see is that creativity has no age.

Productivity does, right?

Which is telling me that
at the end of the day,

if you keep trying --

(Laughter)

you could still succeed
and succeed over and over.

So my conclusion is very simple:

I am off the stage, back in my lab.

Thank you.

(Applause)