False Positivity: Why We Believe the Unbelievable

Everybody Wants To Rule The World (but, statistically, you probably won’t)

With adventurous ventures and mission ambition,

While scheming and dreaming about our position

We pander, sans candor, discuss incorrectly,

The plausible pathways that chart our traject’ry

For MANGOS and FAANG bros1, their nascent potential

Began, with a growth curve beyond exponential

You Aren’t Going to Play Pro Ball

Let the images of childhood return. The brightly-colored classrooms with artwork thumbtacked to wall-hung particle boards. The cubbies and the plastic chairs. The animal crackers and juice boxes. It was against this backdrop that we were posed that perennial cliché of a question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Invariably, these answers contained the starry-eyed optimism of childhood dreamers. The answers contain the rarefied air of professional athletics, voyages through space, and the presidency. We would be fools to curtail such youthful exuberance.

We also recognize, as adults, that the probability that these dreams will be realized is minuscule.

This is why, though we would never discourage the lunchbox-toting youngster from dreams of Super Bowls and Olympic medals, we might be compelled to direct them towards viable fallbacks. Empirically, even in this AI-infused world, there are far more human beings paying their rent with spreadsheets and email than with their eye-hand coordination.

Yet, in so many ways, we remain dreamers, for better and worse.

For every would-be inspirational anecdote about Michael Jordan getting cut from his sophomore basketball team2, those who reach stratospheric heights typically display markers of excellence early and often. Which brings us back to that real-life company with those MS-Teams chats to which you must attend.

Footnotes

  1. Big tech acronyms, if you care↩︎

  2. Firstly, he was 5’11 at that age, and most 5’11 sophomores don’t become 6’6’’. Secondly, he was placed on the JV roster, as was standard procedure at his high school. He became a McDonald’s All-American well before he touched the hardwood at UNC.↩︎