The Formula: The Five Laws Behind Why We Succeed or Fail

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A smart, readable account of the unexpected scientific principles that drive success' - Financial Times The Formula is the groundbreaking book that reveals the indisputable scientific laws that turn achievements into success and shows how you can use them to your own advantage. In The Formula, Albert-Lszl Barabasi, one of the world's leading experts on the science of networks, reveals the unspoken rules behind who gets ahead and why, and outline the five laws that govern this phenomenon and how we can use them to succeed. Drawing on Big Data research that covers everyone from the ace fighter pilot The Red Baron to graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; Miles Davis and his recording of Kind of Blue to Marcel Duchamp and Tiger Woods, Barabasi shows why success can come at any time, as long as we are persistent, why in successful teams one person gets the lion's share of the credit and why the last interviewee almost always gets the job. Unveiling the scientific principles that drive success, and how to leverage them, Barabasi offers a new understanding of the very foundation of how people excel in today's society, and how to harness these principles for yourself.

Reviews

A smart, readable account of the unexpected scientific principles that drive success * Financial Times *
This is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state-of-the-art scientific arsenal we have. Barabsi is the person -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan
It's rare that a book about success turns out to be such a page-turner, but there you go. File [The Formula] away with Freakonomics or Outliers -- Geekwire
A fascinating new book -- Bloomberg Businessweek
A fun, fast, first-hand account of efforts to use big data to pull back the curtain on our collective dynamics. The Formula offers a rich tour of research on how relatively simple feedback forces channel our lives in surprising and counter-intuitive ways * Nature *
An important book for us all to read. It weaves together meticulously researched historical context with more than a decade of Barabsi's and other scholars' "eureka moments" and research findings to extract scientific principles and actionable insights for achieving success * Science *

Author Bio

Albert-Lszl Barabsi is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He also holds appointments in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Central European University in Budapest. His work led to the discovery of scale-free networks, and proposed the Barabsi-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.