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.
Highlights
Performance, representing the totality of objectively measurable achievements in a certain domain of activity, like the publication record of a scientist or the winning record of an athlete or a team, captures the actions of an individual entity [ – ]
3 Conclusions While we would like to believe that fame, visibility and popularity are uniquely determined by performance, representing well-deserved recognition for some sustained or singular achievement, a significant body of media research indicates otherwise, suggesting that fame follows patterns on its own, divorced from talent or performance [ – ]
We find that in tennis a player’s popularity and momentary visibility are uniquely determined by his performance on the court
Summary
Performance, representing the totality of objectively measurable achievements in a certain domain of activity, like the publication record of a scientist or the winning record of an athlete or a team, captures the actions of an individual entity [ – ]. In contrast success, captured by fame, celebrity, popularity, impact or visibility, is a collective measure, representing a community’s reaction to and acceptance of an individual entity’s performance [ , ]. The link between these two measures, while often taken for granted, is far from being understood and often controversial and lopsided. The void between success and performance is well illustrated by the concepts of ‘famesque’, ‘celebutante’ or ‘faminess’, used to label an individual without tangible performance, but ‘known for his well-knowingness’ [ ] These often prompt us to see fame and success as only loosely related to [ – ] and often divorced [ – ] from performance. This dichotomy is illustrated by documented examples of scientists whose popular media visibility significantly exceeds their scientific credentials [ ], or by countless celebrities, from the Kardashian sisters to athletes with no or only underwhelming accomplishments [ – ], as well as by high performers like David Beckham or Tiger Woods who are frequently featured in the media for reasons un-
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