Why I made Paths
I'm Sarthak Agrawal, the creator of Paths. I built this project for anyone who has looked at someone else's achievements and felt behind. A visible outcome leaves out years of work, the help someone received, the constraints they faced, and the openings they could not have planned.
Start with the visual journey, then follow the sources and make up your own mind. The archive currently contains 3,578 published profiles from 10,339 discovered candidates.
An invitation to talk about your path
I'm preparing a podcast pilot to hear these stories from the people who lived them. The conversation would explore what came before the visible milestone: the practice, people, setbacks, decisions and unexpected turns.
You do not need a polished success story. I am interested in what the public account misses, what you are unsure about, and where your experience challenges the project's argument. You can skip any question.
If I sent you an invitation, reply to that message to discuss taking part. We will agree the length, audio or video format, recording permission and publication terms before recording. There is no recording or publication commitment in an initial conversation.
Before publication, you will be able to review the quotes and claims drawn from your conversation. Your account will be clearly attributed to you and kept separate from independently sourced biography and the project's interpretive annotations. An interview will not be used to assign you a score.
What this is
A research beta mapping people who reached a material professional, commercial, creative, athletic, or research milestone early in their careers. The public model keeps their conditions in three places: what the person brought, what they were handed, and what surrounded them.
Perseverance appears only when sources document repeated work, setbacks, recovery, or sustained practice. Luck remains visible and unscored. The early milestone determines inclusion; outcome reach summarizes documented recognition through the data cutoff. The archive includes global icons, field leaders, and professionally distinctive paths. The target is uncapped public-evidence coverage, not a fixed record count or percentile threshold. See the live coverage funnel andhow the evidence model works.
What it is not
- Not a claim of complete capture: private, local, and poorly indexed outcomes remain hard to discover.
- Not representative of the full population; the corpus intentionally contains successful outliers.
- Not a causal estimate of which advantages produce success.
- Not a ranking of human worth or talent.
- Not a predictor of individual outcomes.
Two evidence layers
Biographical layer — names, milestones, age assignments, early-history summaries, family context, and source URLs — intended to summarize public biographical evidence.
Annotation layer — leverage engines and numeric scores — are analyst interpretations applied through a common rubric. They are hypotheses about acceleration mechanisms, not measurements.
Source & release terms
This research build includes 3,578 published people born in or after 1950 and keeps4,076 discovered candidates visible for research or publication. Release terms for the original annotations and scripts are still under review; the repository does not yet grant the suggested CC BY 4.0 or MIT licences. Third-party sources retain their own terms. Seefor source.
Building the site locally
pnpm install && pnpm run dev — Astro dev server onhttp://localhost:4321. Build with pnpm run build.