What does success mean to you? For some, it’s achieving small goals or victories every day. For others, it’s positively impacting society or amassing wealth. But what about those who don’t appear successful by these standards? People who do things for the greater good, care about their community, and avoid lording their status over others? By the metrics of a world obsessed with success, these millions of people are failures.
Researchers have long theorized that success in a given domain can be explained by one of two basic phenomena: either people improve steadily over time, or they get lucky and win on chance. But to truly understand what separates winners from losers, they needed to take a closer look at that “failing and trying again” process. That’s why CSSI’s Yian Yin and PhD student Yang Wang, along with colleagues at the University of Chicago, created a new mathematical model that can pinpoint exactly what separates those who succeed from those who don’t. Read on to find out what they discovered.