What Network Science Teaches Us About Success

We like to believe that success is a simple consequence of talent and hard work.

Do great work and recognition will follow.

At least that’s the story we tell ourselves.

In The Formula, Albert‑László Barabási challenges this idea from a scientific perspective.

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He draws on years of research in network science and analyzes success across different domains such as science, sports, art and business. He arrives at a set of surprisingly consistent patterns. His core message is uncomfortable, but also oddly liberating: success is rarely just about individual performance. It is deeply shaped by networks, timing, and collective perception.

The book is structured around 5 Laws of Success.

If you are interested, please grab a cup of coffee and let’s dive straight into it.

Quick summary for those in a hurry

The quickest summary I can think of is a list of the 5 laws proposed by the author:

• Law 1: when performance can’t be measured [which is often the case], networks drive success.
• Law 2: performance is bounded, success is not.
• Law 3: future success = previous success × fitness [not your physical fitness though].
• Law 4: teams win, individuals get the credit.
• Law 5: with persistence, success can come at any time

Success isn’t about you. It’s about us.

Barabási is a physicist by profession who later turned his attention to network theory.

Early in his career, he studied how failures and natural disasters unfold. When he struggled to publish his work, he tried something different: applying the same analytical methods to success.

His first experiments focused on scientific careers. Could one predict which researchers would publish more papers or receive more citations? The answer was yes. His results were even that good that Nature published them.

From there, the research expanded beyond academia, eventually becoming the foundation for his book: The Formula.

One of the book’s opening stories captures the core idea of success perfectly.

The Red Baron and the Forgotten Ace

During World War I, the Red Baron became a global icon. His name is still widely known today. And yes, the Red Baron was a successful pilot, but he wasn’t the best one. An Allied pilot actually achieved even more victories than the Red Baron, however, that has largely been forgotten.

Why?

Because success is not the same as performance.

Performance is what you do. Success is how others perceive what you do.

Law 1: when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success

In domains where performance is clearly measurable (e.g. sports), better performance usually leads to more success. If you run faster or score more goals, recognition tends to follow.

But many areas of life don’t work that way.

Education, ambition and outcomes

Barabási looked at education as a predictor of later success. Graduates of elite universities, on average, earn more. But correlation is not causation.

In one study, students with nearly identical test scores were compared. One group barely made it into an elite university, the other just missed the cutoff. Years later, their career outcomes were almost identical.

What mattered wasn’t the university ranking itself, but their performance and ambition.

Interestingly, a better predictor of future success was the highest-ranked university a student applied to, regardless of whether they were accepted. Ambition leaves a measurable trace.

The art world problem

In fields like art, music, or literature, performance cannot be objectively measured.

There is no universal scale for “quality”. In these cases, networks become decisive. Who knows whom, where work is shown, and who endorses it often matters more than intrinsic talent.

This is uncomfortable, but true.

Law 2: performance is bounded, success is not

Human performance has natural limits.

A sprinter will never outrun a car. A musician’s technical skill has an upper bound.

Success, however, does not have limits.

Why superstars dominate

Top performance typically follows a normal distribution. The differences between the best performers are often very small and frequently impossible to measure reliably. Think of wine tastings or classical music competitions (the difference between the top can’t be measured objectively in these cases).

Success, on the other hand, follows a power law.

A small number of individuals capture a disproportionate share of attention, rewards, and wealth. This explains why a handful of superstars dominate entire industries and why extreme inequality emerges even when performance differences are marginal.

Success feeds on itself as visibility attracts more visibility.

Law 3: future success = previous success × fitness

Barabási illustrates this with the famous Exploding Kittens Kickstarter campaign. What started with a modest funding goal quickly snowballed into millions. Early traction triggered further attention, which in turn created more traction.

This pattern appears everywhere: in music, science, startups and awards. Once someone is recognized, they become awardable.

The probability of further recognition increases sharply.

This is known as preferential attachment: success attracts success.

The power of early signals

In a fascinating experiment teenagers were asked to download and rate songs. In some groups, download rankings were visible and in others they were hidden. When rankings were visible, popular songs became even more popular.

What mattered most were the first few signals. Early positive feedback often determined whether something took off or disappeared.

Even more interesting: researchers managed to isolate the social influence factor from actual quality. When songs were ranked by this adjusted fitness instead of raw popularity, overall engagement increased significantly. People discovered more music.

The takeaway: we rely heavily on social cues, but better systems could help quality surface more reliably.

Law 4: teams win, individuals get the credit

Breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation.

Successful teams tend to be diverse, balanced and good at communication. Interestingly, teams with higher emotional intelligence perform better and the presence of women often improves team outcomes massively.

At the same time, recognition tends to concentrate on one person: the perceived visionary or leader.

Barabási also points out that all‑star teams can underperform. Too many visionaries can lead to rivalry instead of progress. This diversity works best when roles within a team are complementary.

Law 5: with persistence, success can come at any time

There is a popular belief that great creative breakthroughs only happen early in life.

Barabási’s data tells a different story (fortunately).

Productivity, not age

Younger scientists appear to produce more breakthroughs. For a long time that has been seen as a fact.

Barabási and his team looked deeper into this assumption and discuvered the underlying truth: younger scientis produce more breakthroughs not because they are more creative, but because they are more productive (don’t have families and other obligations yet). They publish more, experiment more and are less constrained by obligations.

The probability that any given idea is a breakthrough remains roughly constant throughout a career. The only way to increase the chance of success is to generate more ideas.

Talent (q) and ideas (r)

Barabási models success as the product of two factors:

• q: a person’s inherent talent in a given domain
• r: the quality of a specific idea

The quality of ideas fluctuates randomly. Talent, however, remains remarkably stable over time.

This has an important implication: if repeated efforts in one domain lead nowhere, it might not be a persistence problem. It might be a domain mismatch.

Since q doesn’t change much, finding the right field matters more than endlessly pushing in the wrong one.

However, persistence still matters and is especially impactful once talent and domain are aligned.

Einstein’s error

The book closes with a symbolic story.

When Einstein arrived in the U.S., huge crowds gathered. Newspapers credited this entirely to him, cementing his celebrity. In reality, many people had come to welcome Chaim Weizmann, a key political figure traveling with him.

History remembers one name.

Again, success is collective perception.

What I take away from The Formula

To me the book really was refreshing. There are many books about success out there and in the past I’ve already picked up some of them. The difference with this one is it’s scientific backing. It’s not just common sense put into a different shape, it is laws derived from experiments.

My main takeaways are:

• Success is not purely a function of performance, but of how performance is perceived by others.
• Networks matter most when quality is hard to measure.
• Success amplifies itself, often starting with small, early signals.
• Talent is stable, ideas vary and persistence increases the odds.

Barabási’s work doesn’t make success feel fair.

But it does make it more understandable. And that, in itself, is empowering: once you understand the system, you can navigate it more consciously.