https://t.me/TED_IWS ended up at the top. So I said, let's look at the numbers -- I'm
a data person, right? So let's see what were the sales for
Nicholas Sparks. And it turns out that that opening
weekend, Nicholas Sparks sold more than a hundred thousand
copies, which is an amazing number. You can actually get to
the top of the "New York Times" best-seller list by selling
10,000 copies a week, so he tenfold overcame what he
needed to be number one. Yet he wasn't number
one. Why? Because there was Dan Brown, who sold 1.2
million copies that weekend.
06:50
(Laughter)
06:52
And the reason I like this number is because it shows that,
really, when it comes to success, it's unbounded, that the best
doesn't only get slightly more than the second best but gets
orders of magnitude more, because success is a collective
measure. We give it to them, rather than we earn it through our
performance.
07:16
So one of things we realized is that performance, what we do,
is bounded, but success, which is collective, is
unbounded, which makes you wonder: How do you get these
huge differences in success when you have such tiny
differences in performance? And recently, I published a book
that I devoted to that very question. And they didn't give me
enough time to go over all of that, so I'm going to go back to
the question of, alright, you have success; when should that
appear?
07:43
So let's go back to the party spoiler and ask ourselves: Why
did Einstein make this ridiculous statement, that only before 30
you could actually be creative? Well, because he looked
around himself and he saw all these fabulous physicists that
created quantum mechanics and modern physics, and they
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