Whatever you changed after your worst week probably got more credit than it deserved.
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The quarter your sales are the worst they’ve been in two years is usually the quarter you fire the marketing agency. You bring in someone new, the next quarter comes in better, and the new agency looks like it knows what it’s doing. Maybe it does. But the next quarter was probably going to be better anyway, and you’ll never know how much of the bounce belonged to them.
The same thing happens in smaller ways all the time. You shoot your worst round of golf in a year, buy a new driver, and your next round is better. You have a miserable week at work, start waking up at five, and the next week goes fine. Your kid brings home the worst report card of the year, you take away the video games, and the next one is better. Each time you changed something at the low point, things improved, and the change got the credit.
Daniel Kahneman described this in his Nobel autobiography. He was teaching flight instructors in the Israeli Air Force that praise works better than punishment, and one of the instructors pushed back. In his experience, when he praised a cadet for a great maneuver, the next one was usually worse, and when he screamed at a cadet for a terrible one, the next one was usually better. So as far as he could tell, yelling worked and praise didn’t.
The instructor had the pattern right and the cause wrong. A great maneuver is usually a good pilot having a better-than-normal attempt, and a terrible one is usually a decent pilot having a worse-than-normal attempt. The next attempt tends to land closer to that pilot’s normal, whatever the instructor says in between. The yelling didn’t fix anything and the praise didn’t ruin anything. The results were drifting back toward average, and the instructor was taking credit and blame for the drift.
Statisticians call this regression to the mean. The name goes back to Francis Galton, who noticed in the 1880s that very tall parents tended to have children who were tall but not quite as tall as them, and very short parents had children who were short but not quite as short. The idea is simpler than the name. Almost any result you care about is part skill and part circumstance, and the extreme results are usually the ones where circumstance happened to lean hard in one direction. Luck doesn’t show up the same way every time, so the next result tends to land closer to normal.
That sounds like a statistics lesson, and it is one, but I think it’s behind a lot of the choices in your life. It shapes how you treat the people around you, how you judge yourself, and which habits you keep for years because you’re sure they worked.
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