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The Formula

The Five Laws Behind Why People Succeed

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The Formula

By: Albert-László Barabási
Narrated by: Ryan Vincent Anderson
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About this listen

This is not just an important but an imperative project' – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan

Master the science of success with The Formula, the ground-breaking international bestseller that reveals the indisputable scientific laws that can turn your achievements into success and how to use them to your own advantage.

Ever wondered about the silent laws at play behind every successful venture? In The Formula, Albert-László Barabási, a preeminent voice in the science of networks, shares the profound scientific rules that determine who truly excels and why.

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 share of the credit and why the last interviewee almost always gets the job.

Discover the five intrinsic laws that govern success and learn to wield them to your advantage. The Formula offers unique, scientifically grounded perspectives on success in today's ever-evolving landscape.

 Business Development & Entrepreneurship Career Success Entrepreneurship Personal Development Personal Success Science

Critic Reviews

A smart, readable account of the unexpected scientific principles that drive success.
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. Barabási is the person (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of Skin in the Game)
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
A fascinating new book
Writing in a lively fashion, he illuminates broad principles that explain how people in all fields – from entrepreneurs to scientists to athletes to artists – achieve success. (Nicholas Christakis, co-author of Connected and the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University)
In his new book, Laszlo Barabási delights us with the stories and mechanisms that explain success in our achievement-obsessed society (Cesar A. Hidalgo, author of Why Information Grows and Director of the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab)
Barabási will indelibly transform the way we all think about success (Alex Pentland, author of Social Physics and Toshiba Professor at MIT)
The Formula is an important book for us all to read. It weaves together meticulously researched historical context with more than a decade of Barabási's and other scholars' "eureka moments" and research findings to extract scientific principles and actionable insights for achieving success
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
All stars
Most relevant
By applying pattern recognitions, trend analyses of large network clicks, hits and ratings, Barabasi gives a quantifiable answer to key psychological questions of what makes a successful person. The lessons (formula) are not only surprising, some confirmatory but seem to be (in the quantifiable world) replicable as any scientific formula would be. And yet: there are very good lessons to be learned from this book.
In addition, it is very well written, at times outright funny and engaging until the very last (quite visionary) pages. Highly relevant and enjoyable.

Insightful, analytic and very relevant

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