Lawrence Dignan

Good point. The greatest longitudinal study I’ve seen is the Harvard one tracking men throughout their lifetimes. It’s summarized here well:

https://www.amazon.com/Triumphs-Experience-Harvard-Grant-Study/dp/0674503813

Success has multiple variables.

A piece of conventional wisdom that I have heard is that “money can’t buy you happiness.” However, depending on how a person spends their money, they may be in a better state than those without money. For example, buying healthier food (which costs more) can lead a person to feel healthier and better overall. This could be tested by polling people from multiple socioeconomic classes and have them rate how happy they are. There may be issues in this process since people may lie about their happiness or may rate their happiness differently depending on the specific day or their mood.

Conventional wisdom states that having an impairment of some sort (hearing, reading, etc.) is a setback, due to which the Goliaths of the World will always triumph over the Davids. However, in his book, ‘David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell identifies that over 30% of the most successful and well known business leaders have suffered such “setbacks,” characteristics that would otherwise deem them Davids. Through anecdotes of exemplary people and statistics, Gladwell disproves this commonly held notion that obstacles and seeming disadvantages are setbacks. The data that can be collected to further prove this is to assess what percentage of agreed upon “successful” individuals have suffered perceived obstacles/setbacks, which is what Gladwell did

It is generally inferred that organization will correlate directly with performance and success; however, there have been many cases where bearers of substantial knowledge have displayed a lack of organization in their daily lives. You could test this by pulling a sample from an online database of students and comparing on the basis of organization and GPA. Organization is a difficult variable to assign a numerical value for, so it would have to be a boolean option.

One piece of conventional wisdom I have heard over and over in the business world is “You have to pay your dues to get ahead.” This is sometimes true; however, sometimes luck, a great interview, or knowing the right person can get you your dream job. In fact, one could argue that a long term of service doesn’t necessarily preclude a raise or promotion. One way we could test this is to do a survey of employees who recently got promoted and survey them about their previous work experience as well as the difficulty of their previous position.

It is said that drunk people are more likely to tell the truth. This can be tested by examine a group of people’s words when they are sober and drunk, and compare whether their words are more reliable when they are drunk than when they are sober. However, it is difficult to judge if a person tells a truth or a lie, which may affect the result of the test, and different people may have different results.

A piece of conventional wisdom I have heard recently is that violent tv and video game makes kids more likely to act out. I think this would be an interesting theory to test with data. One potential option would be to collect data from xbox live to see what kids are playing which games, and cross tabulate it with crime records and school disciplinary records. A second option would be to collect information from kids known to act out about what games/shows are their favorites.

A piece of conventional wisdom I have heard is that lazy people make good leaders. The thought behind this statement is that driven people are working to hard to lead and that lazy people have the time to delegate tasks as a leader. I would interview various groups from a class and see which member of a particular group that their fellow piers thought of as the leader. I could also research various sports teams to see which player their teammates view as a leader of the team. I could then research the GPA of the person thought of as the leader, as well as other organizations the perceived leader may be apart of to see how “driven” they are.

The data may not be that hard with wearable technology. You could see what time people woke up and maybe narrow it down to health and activity levels. Main thread here is to narrow the project. As one of those early birds who will wake up 5 a.m. to work out or run I’m a bit partial to the saying.

Generally speaking I think it’s more true than not. The bigger question is what dues are paid, how fast and what projects you ran to get you someplace. You make your own luck in many cases and a contact only gets you so far. Most of the time you have to deliver the goods once the who you know plays out.

Very interesting. I don’t think it’s lazy as much as knowing what to delegate and building a team that you can hand off to. Delegation is an important skill. I think the conventional wisdom comes from a few dolts that delegate everything and do little. Given we’re all bound by KPIs and data I’m not sure how long a lazy leader can hide.

And you’ve just won the most interesting and possible fun experiment award.