The real relationship between your age and

---

https://t.me/TED_IWS
The real relationship between your age and 
your chance of success
00:03
Today, actually, is a very special day for me, because it is my 
birthday.
00:08
(Applause)
00:12
And so, thanks to all of you for joining the party.
00:15
(Laughter)
00:16
But every time you throw a party, there's someone there to 
spoil it. Right?
00:21
(Laughter)
00:22
And I'm a physicist, and this time I brought another physicist 
along to do so. His name is Albert Einstein -- also Albert -- and 
he's the one who said that the person who has not made his 
great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do 
so.
https://t.me/TED_IWS
Page of 
1
10

---

https://t.me/TED_IWS
00:40
(Laughter)
00:41
Now, you don't need to check Wikipedia that I'm beyond 30.
00:45
(Laughter)
00:47
So, effectively, what he is telling me, and us, is that when it 
comes to my science, I'm deadwood. Well, luckily, I had my 
share of luck within my career. Around age 28, I became very 
interested in networks, and a few years later, we managed to 
publish a few key papers that reported the discovery of scale-
free networks and really gave birth to a new discipline that we 
call network science today. And if you really care about it, you 
can get a PhD now in network science in Budapest, in 
Boston, and you can study it all over the world.
01:26
A few years later, when I moved to Harvard first as a 
sabbatical, I became interested in another type of 
network: that time, the networks within ourselves, how the 
genes and the proteins and the metabolites link to each 
other and how they connect to disease. And that interest led to 
a major explosion within medicine, including the Network 
Medicine Division at Harvard, that has more than 300 
researchers who are using this perspective to treat patients 
and develop new cures.
02:00
And a few years ago, I thought that I would take this idea of 
networks and the expertise we had in networks in a different 
area, that is, to understand success. And why did we do 
that? Well, we thought that, to some degree, our success is 
determined by the networks we're part of -- that our networks 
can push us forward, they can pull us back. And I was curious 
if we could use the knowledge and big data and 
https://t.me/TED_IWS
Page of 
2
10

---