Performance and success are often used as synonyms to express individual accomplishment. However, from a scientific perspective they cover very different concepts: performance is about individual effort, while success is a collective quantity capturing the community’s acknowledgment of effort and performance. In these notes, we investigate the quantitative rules that govern both, trying to model their interdependence within the framework of complex systems. We explore different fields, ranging from online crowdfunding platforms to academia, with the idea of applying scientifically sound methods to uncover the universal laws that determine the allocation of merit in science and society.