Performance can have limitations but success does not. Success is limitless. We shall understand this by following two real examples. If you are marginally having an edge over your competitors, the effect of this margin will be tremendous in your success. You shall realize that this concept holds true in several other fields.
“A strong positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success.” – Dr. Joyce Brothers
Early Career
The first example is Tiger Woods. He was a mere nine months old when he first knocked a ball off a tee. These early attempts were left-handed, literal mirror images of his father’s swings. When he corrected himself a few weeks later, abruptly switching to a right-handed stance, Earl Woods realized his son, still toddling in diapers, had exceptional talent. “I knew he was gonna be the best in the world,” the elder Woods said later. “I just knew it.”
At two, Tiger Woods won a pitch-and-putt competition for kids ten and under. At four, he began to work with professional coach Rudy Duran, who was amazed to witness the kid mechanically hit numerous perfect shots during their first session. Grainy video footage shows Woods, wearing an outsized red trucker hat and tiny white golf gloves, hitting balls across the driving range with adult seriousness.
At six, Woods placed eighth in a ten-and-under Junior World competition. At eight, he won. By fifteen, he was the youngest player to win the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship. He then took his first U.S. Amateur Championship when he was eighteen. After joining the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA), his achievements as a professional golfer are legendary.
Bounded Performance
Given his resume, it’s tempting to conclude that Woods is a rare exception whose performance isn’t bounded. He has the lowest scoring average in PGA history, after all. The scoring system in golf is different than that of most sports, where the higher score is the winner. In golf, success is determined by the lower score or the fewest number of shots taken on the hole or in the round. A list of his records, assembled for his forty-first birthday, contains forty-one entries.
The PGA maintains detailed statistics of each player’s performance, including driving distance, percentage of fairways hit, percentage of greens reached in the regulation number of strokes, and the average number of putts per round. It’s nearly impossible to find a more perfect bell curve in the real world than when you look at how these four performance criteria are distributed among the players. They truly reinforce just how universally bounded performance is: most players are average, and the few who stand out do so by a tiny margin. Tiger Woods, of course, practically kisses the upper bound in all four areas.
But he’s not the best in all of them. For example, in 2013 when he was PGA Player of the Year, his average “strokes gained” from the tee to the green was 1.600; Henrik Stenson’s was 1.612, and Justin Rose’s was 1.914. In this area, both Stenson and Rose performed better than Woods. Or take his 2013 drive distance, a gauge of how far he typically hit—an impressive 293 yards. That put him in the thirty-fifth position in that category. The top player that year, Lake List, had a drive distance of 305 yards. Despite his talent, Woods, like the rest of the competition, has a bounded performance. If he wins, he does so by a fraction of a swing, by masterfully combining different skills. No matter what criteria we look at, he’s not that much better than his competitors.
Disproportionate Relationship
But while Woods’s performance is clearly bounded, his success is limitless. In 2009, Woods became the first athlete to net more than a billion dollars over the course of his career. That same year, he became the second-richest African American, trailing only Oprah Winfrey. Even in 2015, when he no longer dominated golf, he was ranked ninth on the Forbes list of highest-paid athletes. An enormous amount of his wealth comes from endorsement deals, which run the gamut from golf stuff to sports drinks to razors to cars. The five-year deal Woods negotiated with Nike in 2000 for $105 million was, at the time, the largest contract an athlete had ever signed. As part of the agreement, he received a percentage of the sales of Nike’s golf apparel and equipment. He was so central to the brand that for years he collected royalties on it.
Woods is what economists call a superstar, someone exceptionally rewarded for exceptional performance. Superstars exist because success is unbounded. By performing even a fraction better than your competitors, your reward can easily be hundreds, sometimes thousands of times greater. Economist Sherwin Rosen described superstars as “relatively small numbers of people who earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage.” The obvious examples include movie stars, pop singers, high-profile CEOs, and investors.
There is a disproportionate relationship between the quality of superstars’ work and their success, meaning that slightly better performance can lead to an outsized amount of success. “Lesser talent is a poor substitute for greater talent,” Rosen wrote, reminding us that, given the choice between an exceptional singer and one who’s just pretty good, we’ll choose the former. This no-brainer choice prompts all of us to listen to the same songs, read the same books, and watch the same tennis players. It, therefore, skews the market toward those individuals deemed particularly talented.
Best Seller List
Here’s the second example to understand the unbounded nature of success: When Albert-László Barabási’s book Bursts came out in October 2009, he couldn’t help but check who else was competing for the valuable attention of his potential readers.
The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown, was topping the New York Times Best Seller list. In second place was The Last Song, by Nicholas Sparks. He wasn’t surprised to see a Da Vinci Code sequel i.e. The Lost Symbol taking top billing, but he was curious about the runner-up. It’d be easy to conclude that if Nicholas Sparks worked a little harder or his publicist performed a little better, he could unseat Dan Brown. What could Nicholas Sparks have done differently?
The answer is… nothing. Sure, number two is almost number one. But when he looked at the sales data, he discovered that The Last Song sold 120,000 copies that week, an astonishing number. Keep in mind that most bestsellers sell in the range of 3,000 to 5,000 copies a week. The other 99 percent of books sell far fewer. By all standards, Nicholas Sparks had achieved dramatic success.
But The Lost Symbol, only a single position higher than The Last Song, sold 1.2 million. Brown didn’t just edge out Sparks. He sold an incredible ten times the number of copies. Is The Lost Symbol ten times better than The Last Song? Unlikely. The difference in their sales has nothing to do with performance, which is inherently bounded. Instead, it shows how limitless success can be. (Excerpt is from ‘The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success’ by Albert-László Barabási)
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