The man you want to be does not matter
swiz.ec
swiz.ec
Maybe I am using a 'thinking shortcut', but can you please source the evidence for there not being a correlation between past performance and future performance?
Or take a look at music bands. First few albums are smashing hits, then suddenly, no more takers. Everything they create is simply not accepted by the fans. The mojo is gone.
Perhaps startups are a bit less fragile, or I just don't know enough history, but I think similar patterns emerge if you look widely enough.
edit: actually, We Live In Public (movie) could be a good example. Josh Harris had a really really successful first venture, after the web1.0 crash, nothing he tried doing really caught on and became something. At the end of the movie about him, he's hiding from creditors in africa or something.
Performance and public perception are not the same thing. One is much more steady and less susceptible to wild and capricious swings than the other.
Most people have a fairly stable level of performance over time, except when dramatic or destructive events or behaviour interfere (such as drug abuse, stock market crashes, etc.) The millions of people who are stably employed and have been for years are clear evidence of this. If past performance was not an indicator of future performance, then work experience, resumes, and criminal histories are all meaningless.
Past performance is evidence for the consistency of present behaviour.
For every famous artist who struggled and then made it big, there are thousands of artists who were treated the same initially but really were crap. That's because a huge number of people want to be artists and 90% of everything is crap.
Now suppose that you are trying to make money by enabling artists, and it costs $10,000 to give one a try. If you take a chance on everyone, you will go broke because 90% of everything is crap and your few famous artists won't be enough to subsidize the rest.
So how do you filter?
Isn't it the case that if past performance is an indicator of future performance then there is no hope of improving anything?
I really think there is quite serious denial of the possibility of bad things happening to people which effects their performance and it not being their fault, often with very serious consequences for them.
I have a friend who had a family crisis occur during his A-levels; the impact on his future prospects was huge and he has had to struggle to stand a chance at getting a decent job. I personally had a family crisis during my degree which several impacted my performance and has destroyed my confidence, something which still impacts me today (though I did manage to get a 2:1 despite it all), does that mean I cannot perform well in the future?
I understand what you're saying about there being an overall correlation but I really do think you have to be careful about it - on the whole, it may be true, but it's the individual edge cases that matter, and adopting that position as if it was some immutable fact is dangerous.
They are acting rationally though. Take, for example, your anecdote about your friend's employment difficulty. The employer is just trying to get the best person they can for the job. They can't realistically predict future performance of the person they hire so they just rely on credentialism and base the decision on past performance/qualifications in the hope that a person who performed well in the past will continue to do so.
I think it's very important to highlight that these judgements aren't etched in stone, though, it's a point which is lost in that phrase, hence me not being a huge fan of it.
When people are at a loss for how to make a hiring decision and they have a giant pile of applications in front of them, they are liable to just choose whatever filter is available. It might not be any better than reading tea leaves, but at least the decision gets made. This is rational behavior when the cost of devising or applying a better criterion is high, but it doesn't mean the resulting criterion is the best thing possible.
I could go on with examples. Why is it for example, that people want to get to know each other better before they hop into some kind of mutual arrangement or contract? Could it be, because we all try to predict future behavior from past behavior?
Of course we could all be wrong - in general or in certain circumstances. Maybe a pedophile will never molest a child again in the future. Or maybe the girl you dated who was very obnoxious will change for the better. Yet, this is unlikely (remember: this is still a statistical argument). So the burden of proof is with the guy who came up with this hypothesis.
EDIT: Regarding the "the fact that Google does it doesn't proof anything" argument. Would you say that Google should just throw a coin to decide which applicant to take or simply take the first k applicants (say, in alphabetical order) and Google would not be worse off than they are with the current interview process?
You also can't just "decide to shape the future", you've got to actually analyze your past and develop ways of deflecting your current path. The problem people have is they think over-much and experiment too little.
Don't know who said it, but I love it. And I think it's a good tl;dr for this post.
"The requested URL /blog/the-man-you-want-to-be-does-not-matter/swizec/2071 was not found on this server."
Which do you think better to be remembered for?
If the past doesn't matter and the future doesn't matter why then do you care how people in the future will remember you?