Success breeds success.

It's one of the most reliable findings in all of sociology—so reliable it has its own name. You may have heard it called "The Matthew Effect."

What you may not have heard, however, is that Matthew has a cousin—a less famous law that shapes our fate with equal force. Unlike Matthew, it applies whether you’re just starting out or climbing your next big peak.

To shine some light on this sociology, we need to meet three young musicians: all talented enough to play in the same high school band, yet whose paths diverged in dramatic fashion shortly thereafter.

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and why when you’re launching something new, you need social dandelions.

One moment, a wall of sound was bouncing around a high-school auditorium in northern Minnesota. The next, an adult stepped in and pulled the plug. The music was too loud, the audience too unruly.

It was the late 1950s and the band onstage (now lobbing protests at the offending teacher) was “The Golden Chords”. They were a group of teenagers who grew up in the small mining town of Hibbing, and who were obsessed with the new electricity crackling through American rock ‘n’ roll. There was Monte Edwardson on guitar, LeRoy Hoikkala on drums—and a skinny kid on piano who kept pushing the volume higher. For now, his name was Robert Zimmerman.

When 1958 rolled around, Edwardson and Hoikkala left to join a new band—a move that Zimmerman would still begrudge many years later.

And this is where their destinies take a radical departure.

For Hoikkala, the story stayed local. He continued to play but stayed in Hibbing—where he would reside the rest of his life. Edwardson remained too, although would eventually move to Colorado for family reasons. Zimmerman, meanwhile, picked a different direction.

He held a burning desire to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie, one of the most influential figures in American Folk music. In 1961, he acted on this impulse. He threw his guitar into a friend’s four-door Pontiac and drove to New York City.

After locating Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, Zimmerman started visiting him for hours at a time, playing songs at his hero's bedside. But outside the ward, his own struggle was just starting. He’d arrived without a plan, dead broke, and during the “Great Kennedy Inaugural Snowstorm”—a brutal freeze that buried New York under a foot of snow. To make a living, he spent his nights working Greenwich Village’s folk scene, performing for loose change at open mic nights (“hootenannies”) in any club that would allow him in.

If his former bandmates could see him now, what would they make of his New York escapade? They would have seen a decision that made no sense. While they enjoyed the comfort of their homes in Hibbing, Zimmerman was begging for nickels in a basement.

But then the winds changed.

After two months of scraping by, Zimmerman was offered something more substantial. One of the clubs he’d frequented, Gerde's Folk City, was run by a respected booker named Mike Porco—a man with a reputation for turning passing amateurs into paid professionals.

Won over by Zimmerman’s talent after weeks of watching him hustle, Porco offered a professional gig opening for a legendary blues star. But the deal hit an immediate snag. At nineteen, Zimmerman was too young to hold the mandatory cabaret card required to perform in New York’s licensed clubs. In a quiet measure of how warm their relationship had grown, Porco signed on as his licensed guardian, personally escorting him to the license bureau to secure the papers.

The base he established at Gerde's with Porco would prove pivotal.

One night at the club, an opportunity to climb the next rung of the career ladder walked in. Folk singer Carolyn Hester was introducing a song onstage, "Lonesome Tears," by mentioning that Buddy Holly had taught it to her. "Before you know it,” Hester remembers, ”somebody in this little hat pulled his chair up to almost beside me. He said, 'Is that true about Buddy Holly? I just think the world of him.” With his hand outstretched and a charming smile, “It’s nice to meet you," Zimmerman said.

One thing led to another.

By September, Zimmerman had parlayed his handshake into another warm relationship. He’d convinced Hester to let him play harmonica for her first album—an album that was being produced by Columbia Records. He was now one heartbeat away from the world’s most prestigious label. His decision to leave home was seeming less reckless by the day.

When Zimmerman arrived, he was greeted by none other than John Hammond—the industry’s most significant talent scout. Hammond took an immediate liking to Zimmerman and the pair chatted for hours after the session. Could he secure his own contract with the same label as Johnny Cash and Aretha Franklin, Zimmerman wondered?

The next breakthrough followed fast.

It was only two weeks later when the network Zimmerman built crescendoed. The New York Times published a rave review about one of his performances at Gerde’s. Upon reading it, Hammond immediately invited him to his office, where a contract was awaiting his signature.

Just ten months after leaving his home state, Zimmerman’s name was set to become famous the world over.

But not the one given to him by his parents.

It would be the stage name he legally adopted the following June.

Bob Dylan.

It’s unclear whether he was conscious of what he was doing, but during his first year in New York, Dylan was flawlessly executing a playbook backed up by bleeding-edge science.

A study published last month (December 2025) found that Dylan’s rise follows a hidden map. Conducted by professors at Kellogg School of Management, RPI, and Zhejiang University, it pinpointed a pattern that defines almost every high-achieving career.

The high-achievers at the heart of the study were elite computer scientists—winners of the Nobel Prize or the Turing Award, the highest honors the field can bestow. The question the study sought to answer was simple: is there a recipe for reaching the top echelons of academia?

More specifically: does it matter who you work with along the way? There's a saying in the film industry, "it's not what you know, it's who you know." But surely that doesn't apply to the rigorous world of high-level science, where we hope the most meritocratic ideas win the day?

To untangle the social architecture of success, the professors analyzed the collaboration habits of five thousand prizewinners over sixty years. It was a web of data so dense they had to use GPT-4o and a custom-built database just to map the connections.

After months of tracing nearly a million collaborative relationships, they found their recipe. The prizewinners did indeed share something in common—a habit early in their careers that gave them a striking advantage over those who never won a prize:

They collaborated with scientists who had already won a prize.

Future prizewinners teamed up with existing prizewinners earlier and more often than non-winners. The biggest surprise was the sheer magnitude of the effect. If a scientist formed a strong partnership with a prizewinner early in their career, their own odds of winning a prize didn't just go up slightly—they jumped by nearly six-fold.

An effect size that large is an extreme rarity.

Once their first prize was secured, the Matthew Principle predictably kicked in. For early-career researchers, the number of people wanting to collaborate with them increased tenfold, jumping from an average of 25 colleagues to over 250. Success bred success, but it had to start somewhere. That somewhere was almost always with someone who'd already made it.

We want to believe an ascent like Bob Dylan's is a triumph of talent so undeniable that the world has no choice but to listen. But the data from our study suggests that Dylan's most brilliant move wasn't a lyric or a melody, but his proximity and relational intensity.

It was his climb up the folk world’s equivalent of a prizewinner ladder—a path that ran from the guardianship of Mike Porco straight through to the recording session with Carolyn Hester—that finally deposited him in the office of John Hammond. He traded the isolation of Hibbing for a hub where the winners of the folk world hung out, triggering that six-fold leap in his own odds.

Were Dylan’s high school band mates, Edwardson and Hoikkala, just as capable? It's impossible to know for certain. They were good enough to share a stage with him. But by staying home, they guaranteed the question would never be answered. Whatever gifts they had would remain unwitnessed by anyone who could amplify them.

But relocating to the hub isn't the same as cracking it. You might assume the next step after arrival is to network aggressively—to meet as many people as you can, shake every hand, and hope one of those connections pay off. The study found the opposite.

Scientists with the largest co-author networks were actually less likely to win prizes. The professors called this "degree"—a measure of how many different people you've worked with. And it turned out to be negatively associated with success.

The scientists who won prizes forged intense, sustained collaborations with a small number of people who were already at the top of their field. Fewer connections, but stronger ones.

Plenty of musicians made the pilgrimage to Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Most of them shook hands, played a few gigs, and faded into obscurity. What separated Dylan was the depth of the relationships he built once he arrived.

He became so close with Mike Porco that he signed on as his legal guardian. He didn't just introduce himself to Carolyn Hester—he talked his way into her recording session. He spent hours in conversation with John Hammond after that first meeting. Dylan's network was small but intense.

None of this is to say that talent doesn't matter.

Dylan couldn't have charmed his way into Hammond's office if he couldn't play. Porco didn't sign on as his guardian out of pity—he did it because he'd watched Dylan perform night after night and recognized his gift. The doors opened because Dylan had the goods to back up his boldness.

It's hard to find successful exceptions who snub this law.

Ryan Holiday started as Robert Greene's research assistant. MrBeast was making next to nothing until he joined a mastermind with several YouTubers further ahead than him. J.K. Rowling had Christopher Little—a partnership later described as "the most commercially successful relationship in literary history." Walt Disney cut his teeth at Universal Pictures. Starbucks as we know it wouldn't exist if Bill Gates Sr. hadn't stepped in to save Howard Schultz. Michael Jordan had Dean Smith. Jane Goodall had Louis Leakey. Jean-Michel Basquiat had Andy Warhol. Marc Benioff had Larry Ellison.

Name a giant, and somewhere in their story is a bigger giant who believed in them first.

Collaborating with prizewinners may seem like an obvious thing to do. Of course it helps to work with people who've already made it. The question you have to ask yourself is: are you doing it?

Most people fall into one of three camps.

The first are the lone wolves. They refuse to pursue this strategy altogether. Maybe they're fiercely independent, convinced they can make it on raw talent alone. Maybe they're introverts who find the idea of seeking out successful people distasteful. Whatever the reason, they work in isolation—and the data suggests they pay a steep price for it.

The second group are the horizontal networkers. They collaborate plenty, but not with people who've already achieved what they're working toward. They team up with peers at their own level, or with people in adjacent fields, or with whoever happens to be nearby. They're social, but not strategic.

The third group are the vertical networkers. These are the people actively collaborating with prizewinners—forging deep relationships with those who've already reached the top. If you're in this camp, your task isn't to start doing something new. It's to ask whether you're pursuing this strategy to its full extent. Are there doors you haven't knocked on? Are you working with winners on one project, but neglecting them on another?

Regardless of which camp you're in, the blockers tend to be the same.

Sometimes the blocker is an intolerance of discomfort. Collaborating with prizewinners often means going to where they are—and that can require uprooting your life. There's a scene in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer where leading scientists are being recruited to join the Manhattan Project. Some of them gawk at the idea of relocating to a remote desert outpost for years on end. The ones who said yes changed history. The ones who said no... didn't.

Sometimes the blocker is an unwillingness to be resourceful. Pursuing prizewinners might require financial sacrifice—turning down a stable job for an uncertain opportunity, raising money to fund a move, or enlisting the support of others to make it work. It can take effort that many aren't prepared to invest.

And sometimes the blocker is ego. For some, their pride has grown too large. They can't stomach the idea of seeking out someone more successful—it feels like an admission that they need help. For others, it's the opposite problem: their confidence is too fragile. They don't believe they're worthy of a prizewinner's time. They never reach out because they've already decided the answer is no.

The reasons vary. But the outcome is always the same: a ceiling on what's possible.

Sociologists named the Matthew Effect after a verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For to everyone who has, more will be given." Success compounds. The rich get richer.

So what should we call Matthew's cousin?

In the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah takes on a young apprentice named Elisha. Before Elijah departs, Elisha makes a bold request: "Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit." Elijah's mantle falls to him—literally, his cloak—and Elisha goes on to perform twice as many miracles as his mentor.

Hence, The Elisha Effect: the phenomenon whereby collaboration with high achievers dramatically increases one's own odds of high achievement. Find someone who has already won, and ask for a double portion of their spirit.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky’s monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest January edition, Scott explores how to win the era of "superhumanity"—cultivating taste, overriding ancestral logic, and learning to be jazz partners with thinking technologies.

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