An anchoring effect is at play.
Professionals, and people more in general, are defined by what they have done so far, especially after becoming full-fledged adults. The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today.
Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we see the paths of others.
Interestingly, baseball is the only sport in which the ordinary athlete, not the exception represented by the 20-year-old Dominican superstar, has to go from the minors to MLB. In all other sports, there is no adult developmental league to speak of. Sure, players transition from lower to higher level teams all the time, but those teams, apart from the usual exceptions, fly around in the same rarefied atmosphere of excellence.
For those who haven't done anything yet there is a "maybe, who knows" penciled next to the box, but for those who have done poorly there is a big "on to the next" written next to it.
The assumption is that large course deviations are unlikely and not sudden. It's like air temperature: the best predictor of tomorrow's temperature, without knowing much or anything else, is today's temperature.
A person in a strong relationship today is more likely to be in a relationship a month from now than someone in a "weaker" relationship today. You might say, "Well, that's obvious," but it's a similar lens to the one we use to look at other people's professional lives, which is that, by and large, people are more likely to be in the future what they have been for five years than what you think their potential might be.
As someone who worked in academia before moving to the technology sector, the main concern I found with hiring managers was that I would be "too academic." You may think these labels are meaningless: everyone can change and adapt quickly to new realities or to their jobs. But there is a certain mindset that undoubtedly can remain for quite some time, when not forever.
Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we see the paths of others.
Interestingly, baseball is the only sport in which the ordinary athlete, not the exception represented by the 20-year-old Dominican superstar, has to go from the minors to MLB. In all other sports, there is no adult developmental league to speak of. Sure, players transition from lower to higher level teams all the time, but those teams, apart from the usual exceptions, fly around in the same rarefied atmosphere of excellence.
For those who haven't done anything yet there is a "maybe, who knows" penciled next to the box, but for those who have done poorly there is a big "on to the next" written next to it.