  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.
