Title
Untangling Performance from Success
Abstract
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an individual measure that captures the actions of a performer, from success, a collective measure that captures a community’s reactions to these actions. Yet, finding the relationship between the two measures is essential for all areas that aim to objectively reward excellence, from science to business. Here we quantify the relationship between performance and success by focusing on tennis, an individual sport where the two quantities can be independently measured. We show that a predictive model, relying only on a tennis player’s performance in tournaments, can accurately predict an athlete’s popularity, both during a player’s active years and after retirement. Hence the model establishes a direct link between performance and momentary popularity. The agreement between the performance-driven and observed popularity suggests that in most areas of human achievement exceptional visibility may be rooted in detectable performance measures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0079-z
EPJ Data Sci.
Keywords
Field
DocType
success, performance, popularity
Data science,Visibility,Computer science,Popularity,Individual sport,Performing arts,Excellence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1512.00894
1
2193-1127
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.47
8
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
burcu yucesoy171.21
Albert-lászló Barabási246491107.35