Scholars are no different from other people – they desire success. In this issue of State of Affairs we attempt to define success among scholars. Izabela Wagner extensively analyses the career strategies (which were not always honest) of a certain Outstanding Scholar of international renown. Other authors present ways of achieving individual and collective success: from the Leo Strauss and Tartu-Moscow schools through the Flakhelfer generation (Habermas, Ratzinger, Luhmann) to the Warsaw school of the historians of ideas. The issue is completed by Antoni Sułek’s article on the methodological challenges of survey research on anti-Semitism.