On performance variation

Assume that the performance of someone at work looks like this: This may be the case because of various reasons: the task is not standarized person gets tired creativity is required environment is not stable task difficulty is not uniform In some jobs, we are able to build systems that kind of filter out the “bad” parts, so the performance looks more like: Example of such systems: One person creating multiple version of their work and picking the best (authors, presenters, software engineers) Different people/teams/machines/companies do the same work unit and pick the best (manufacturing CPUs, picking fruits from a tree, research etc) Parts of such system (people, companies, teams) are sometimes even encouraged to display variation, since the “bad” values get filtered out. So, it may not be surprising that in day to day life brilliant moments are intervened with (perhaps many) silly moments. This may also partially explain the caricature we see in movies of a brilliant scientist who…

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