Midweek #131 - Genius and Stupid Are Closer Together than You Think

Evaluating human performance across professions

Last week, I said that success is a result of skill and luck. If that is true, and we can’t separate skill and luck with certainty, how should we look at human performance?

To answer this question, here are some stats on Michael Jordan I pulled out from a Columbia University blog. From a comment to the blog post [bless you, Jordan fans]: 

Take Michael Jordan as both an example, perhaps an exception that both proves and disproves the rule, of the rookie phenom regressing to the mean. In his highest PPG seasons (1986-87 & 1987-88) he scored 37.1 and 35.0 points per game respectively. The Bulls ended in 8th and 3rd. During each of the 3-peat runs Jordan averaged 31.4 and 29.6 respectively. Was this regression to the mean only to be expected or was it that Scottie Pippen averaged 19.1 & 20.3 points per game during each of those runs? Or was it that he faced better defense?

Any of you who have seen The Last Dance would remember that Jordan had a phenomenal rookie season and followed it up — after a much-truncated second season because of a broken foot — with two outstanding seasons. If that was rare, what made his feats stratospheric was that his points per game for the next five years did not drop below 30. 

What does Jordan’s career say about how you — a manager, a leader, a knowledge worker — should make hires?

1️⃣Don’t make hiring decisions by the extreme-ness of the career highlight. Look for consistency and longevity instead. 

2️⃣Know that the candidates who appear extreme in either direction are most probably less extreme if measured again. Temper your expectations.

3️⃣Beware of finding cause-and-effect relationships for things that are simply symptoms of a reversal to the average. Think of alternatives to the stories that immediately jump out. 

A good barometer for the proportion of skill needed in the recipe for success in a profession or activity is the longevity of its top performers. If an outcome was entirely a matter of luck, it would be hard to beat the odds again and again. Do you know any repeat lottery winners?

When chance plays a hand in your career makes a difference too. A child prodigy is called that and not just a prodigy thanks to regression to the mean. Albert Einstein was an early-career prodigy. He saw a period of extraordinary scientific contribution very early in his career. The weight of his later work dropped. Hilary Mantel went through a career of relative obscurity before winning two Booker prizes from the last three books she wrote. 

On the other hand, the best in a profession dominated by skill can slow down regression. They can up their skill to a level that drowns out random fluctuations. That’s what is meant by being so good you’re the best even on your bad days.

Tennis star Rafael Nadal has a 112-3 win-loss record at the Roland Garros, popularly known as the French Open.

Rafael Nadal preparing to serve (after a litany of rituals that his fans swear by and Federer fans loathe)

If going by Kahneman’s judgment, Success = Talent + Luck

Success in a particular competition = Above-average skill at the competition + Lucky in the competition

Now it is possible that luck may have gone Nadal’s way one year at the French Open. The championship winner has to win only seven matches in a row. But to win sequences of seven matches not once, not twice, but fourteen times means having the skill to counterbalance a stretch of poor luck.

It seems reasonable to believe that some years Rafael Nadal won the French Open despite being unlucky. In those years,

Success = Way-above-average skill + unlucky in the competition

Nadal’s stellar record at the French Open points to two things: 

1️⃣he has earned his success because of his high skill level AND 

2️⃣he is so far superior to his contemporaries that he has been successful in spite of the vagaries of nature (being in a more difficult half of the draw, injuries, weather, et cetera)

---

 If success = talent + luck, it follows that talent contributes to success because of it while luck leads us to success regardless of your talent. So,

Success = success because of your skill + success regardless of your skill

👉Success in sales = success because of your selling skills + success because you happen to be selling a great product (something that is completely unrelated to your skill)

👉Success in management = success because of your ability to lead + success because you’ve a great team (unrelated to you)

In What Got You Here Won’t Get you There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith writes:

Successful people tend to have a high “internal locus of control.” In other words, they do not feel victims of fate. They see success for themselves and others as largely a function of people’s motivation and ability—not luck, random chance, or external factors.

Achievers tend to believe that their success is earned through their ability and motivation (and others’ failures are similarly earned through their lack of ability and motivation). It is plain to see how such a belief empowers. It also hoodwinks. It makes us explain randomness away with our awesomeness-ness. It makes us think we have more control over the outcome than we actually do. 

But acknowledging randomness underestimates the role of our hard-earned skill in our success and suggests a ‘what’s the point of life’ kind of fatalism.

This knot hints at the reason why regression to the mean is such a hard idea to wrap our heads around. The answer, perhaps, is in the message of the Stoics. Focus on what you can control, ignore the rest.

If you’ve a unique way of looking at the randomness of life, I and all the readers would love to know about it. Until Friday…