The perception of success changes with age. There is an American researcher (Barabasi) who studies “success” with scientific methods. His research may change your idea of success.
This is the fourth article in the Code Life series, which includes the following table of contents:
- Have you ever diss someone else’s code? What makes good code?
- Do programmers and leaders misunderstand project delay?
- A joke from the programmer’s wife
- Success, yoga, huang xiaoming | middle-aged programmers think hard to success
- A coder’s wild idea for the project
How to define success
- In order to lose weight, I have been on a vegetarian diet for a month.
- I was timid, but I plucked up the courage to speak at a meeting of 2,000 people.
Of course you can say that these are successes for me. Yes, but Barabbasi doesn’t study this kind of “success”; he studies secular “success”.
If you’re a writer, your success is how well you sell your books. It’s not about how you feel about yourself, it’s about how society approves of you. It’s not about subjective judgment, it’s about objective, measurable things.
Barabbasi is not studying “success”, but the science of success. Inspirational stories and celebrity biographies can provide some inspiration, but that is “personal knowledge”, not science. Scientific theories must be repeatable, verifiable, and supported by data.
What Barabbasi is doing is using the Internet and big data to do statistics that weren’t possible before:
- They looked at all the academic papers that have ever been written, and they looked at how every scholar has grown up.
- They took all the weekly book sales data in the United States and looked at how well each book sold.
- They have data from all the museums and art exhibitions around the world, so they can see how every modern artist has prospered.
The characteristic of these data is that they are all-encompassing, so to speak, and they know all the successes and failures in a field. Then they find some rules, which they call “laws of success.” The law means that you can’t accept it, whether you like it or not, that’s the way the world is.
Business performance ≠ success
Let’s say you’re a painter. In the eyes of the experts at the Academy of Fine Arts, your painting technique, the artistic conception of your work. In particular, your aesthetic vision has greatly exceeded the contemporary famous painter Leng Jun. But your paintings don’t sell, while One of Leng Jun’s can sell for thousands of yuan. I’m sorry, but you’re not a success.
Business performance is your business. All the self-improvement techniques we talk about — deliberate practice, willpower, productivity — are studies of how to improve business performance. Business performance, that you are a master, but master is not necessarily successful.
Your success depends on us
Barabbasi gives an example. In World War I, there was a German ace pilot named Manfred von Richthofen who shot down 80 enemy planes and was nicknamed “the Red Baron”. He is not only skilled but also conspicuous personality, deliberately painted his plane red, particularly conspicuous in the air, to challenge the opposing pilots.
The Red Baron is not only well-known in Germany, but also in the world, appearing in various movies and TV works. Many years after his death, the American cartoon “Snoopy” still has his image, western boys almost know there is such a red baron.
Was the Red Baron the best performing pilot of world War I? It isn’t. Rene Funk, a French aviator of the same era, shot down more than 100 planes while still fighting better than the Red Baron (who died on the battlefield). Funk, however, is far less famous than the Red Baron. Funk’s Wikipedia page has only 18 languages, while Red Baron has 52.
‘Success doesn’t depend on how well your business performs, but how well your business performs for social networks,’ Barabbasi said.
The Red Baron was worth more to Germany than just shooting down 80 fighters. Germany’s propaganda apparatus needs his image to lift the national spirit. The red baron had a good background, personality and a high profile love of combat, especially in line with the needs of Germany at that time, Germany opened a group of horsepower propaganda. Funk’s social network has no such need.
It’s not how your business performs that determines your success, it’s how your business is perceived. In other words, “Your success is not up to you, it’s up to us, society.”
Huang Xiaoming that sentence “I don’t want you to feel, I want me to feel!” It’s the opposite of the law of success.
Success is beyond our control. It is contingent. It is governed by a force larger than the individual. Barabbasi calls this force “social networks,” while religion calls it “divinity.”
yoga
After reading Barabasi’s book, I think of yoga. Yoga is a transliteration of Sanskrit yug, which means “unity,” “union,” or “harmony.” Yug is not a simple name, it contains such a layer of cause and effect: “You and X combine, you and X will be harmonious.”
What does a yogi wish to associate with? There are eight stages of yoga practice, called the eight branches. They are:
- Maintain the
- diligence
- postures
- pranayama
- Making sense
- focus
- meditation
- samadhi
The observance of precepts is a social norm. It includes non-violence, honesty, no stealing, temperance and no greed. This can be understood as the basis of social integration.
Refinement is a personal principle. It includes cleanliness, contentment, introspection, and reverence for god. This can be understood as the basis for the combination with the better self of the future.
Asana is known as “concave shape”. You can think of it as joining your own muscles and joints.
Pranayama is a breathing exercise. You can think of it as joining your breath.
Mindfulness is the focus of consciousness on one point (which can be anything tangible or intangible) on the basis of mindfulness, which can be understood as the basis of union with one’s heart.
The concentration phase is followed by the continuous concentration phase of meditation, which is a state of deep, undisturbed meditation in which the mind, body and breath become one. (In brain science parlance, brain waves are alpha waves)
The highest state of yogic practice, known as Samadhi, is the ultimate form of meditation, “the union of the consciousness of the self with the consciousness of the god.”
Yoga says, “Combine, and good things will happen.”
To paraphrase Barabbasi’s research in terms of “bonding” : You can succeed only if your business performs well enough and it can be aligned with the needs of the social network.
Connect with the people around you
Hard work can improve business performance, but whether it can be combined with the needs of social networks is not determined by hard work (otherwise there would be so many literati chanting about their unappreciated talents). The success of Barabasi’s research is irrelevant to most people because society doesn’t have so much need to succeed.
In addition to connecting with social networks, connecting with people around you is a lifelong exercise. Why do we need to combine, because “we are different”, different will lead to estrangement, estrangement will be difficult to get along with, difficult to cooperate. Only combination is the ultimate solution.
Two people of different backgrounds and growing environment go together, three views and ways of doing things are inevitably some inconsistent. If both parties go their own way, disagree, or even blame each other, this intimate relationship will not go far. You know that he is different from you, and he knows that you are different from him. Mutual understanding, tolerance, and closeness can only enhance intimacy. Eventually you became me, and I became you, and the two became one.
Somewhere along the way, you just can’t see what your parents are doing, and your relationship has grown apart. That’s because you’re changing with the world, but they’re just the same, you don’t see eye to eye, you don’t see eye to eye, you don’t see eye to eye. This inevitable generation gap is always unpleasant. Only combination can bridge the generation gap. The way to get along with the elderly is to look at things from their parents’ point of view, think what they think and understand the reasons behind their thoughts.
After family and friends, co-workers should be the people you spend the most time with. In the case of programmers, upstream is the product manager and downstream is testing. Although everyone is working towards the same big goal — providing high-quality apps — their priorities are different, and this inconsistency can lead to internal friction if not handled properly. Even people who don’t work on the Internet know that programmers and product managers are mortal enemies. Visible because of inconsistencies caused by the lethality of the opposing mood. Only combination is the solution, we programmers only do “have the product in mind, have the test in mind, think about the product, think about the test and think about it”, can let themselves and colleagues around have a better, more efficient cooperation atmosphere. The whole value chain flows more smoothly.
Isn’t it a success to get along and cooperate better with people around you? Maybe this will take you one step closer to worldly success.
Bond, and good things will happen.