Bibliometric benchmarking can be an aid to researchers pondering whether to apply for competitive grants. In this paper, the highly prestigious grants offered by the European Research Council to young scientists of any nationality were scrutinized. The analysis of the 2014-2015 data indicates that over 75% of life science grantees in the starting category (2-7 years after completing a Ph.D. degree program) had at least 14 papers and an H-index of 10 (28 and 16, respectively, in the case of the consolidator category--i.e., 7-12 years after obtaining the Ph.D.). Yet other signs of excellence, expert advice, and the limitations of metric approaches need to be considered.