Is persistence really a good quality of success? “Keep at it.” Actutally, no. Matter of fact, it is one of the least important, but people like to overemphasize it, especially adults. Why? The “sunk cost fallacy.” Adults are particularly prone to being affected by this, but childern are completely immune. The idea is that if you’ve invested a lot of work into something, then you should keep working at it and it will come to fruition much sooner than would starting all over do. As it turns out, this is not true. Often times, people’s success is not related to how much work they put in, but to their substantiated conditions. To be totally blunt, such “demographic” substantiated conditions are by far the biggest thing that can be statistically measured and proven out to scale across multiple people, not just anecdotal evidence particular to one person. So yes, it turns out that if you want to be successful, you should start by choosing the areas that have the best success rates. That is the best success factor. Compared to the weight of this factor, the effort you put in is relatively “small,” but that doesn’t mean you should expect to get all the way through with very little effort, as might be the assumption of some smarter students who generally aren’t mentally challenged by school.
- Important! Again, I reiterate, because this is important! This is a great way to deliver career decision-making advice.