***If you have yet to read any of my guest bloggers, today is the day you should start. My Asian Bro is insightful and stretches the mind and heart to think beyond the immediate moment. With any luck, My Asian Bro will be a frequent guest blogger. Enjoy!
Regression Towards the Mean
The Statistical Phenomenon
I am not a statistician. In fact, the only class that I ever worried I might actually fail was taught out of the statistics department. And they probably should have failed me. Nevertheless, statistics does intrigue me. In part, I think, because it can describe so much without ever really explaining anything. One statistical concept that has caught my eye recently is called “regression towards the mean.” I’ll spare you the full technical description. You all have Wikipedia. In inaccurate layman’s terms, it simply means that excellence and ineptitude tend to revert to mediocrity. Take a class of students. Give them a multiple choice test. Give them another similar test. Statistics (from my reading of Wikipedia) says that those students who scored the best and the worst on the first test will tend to score closer to the average on the second test.
The Phenomenon in Real Life
I find that this concept resonates deeply with me as a person. I have dreams. I make goals. I want to be a different, a better person tomorrow than I was today. On some days, I succeed. Wildly. I’m as kind as Mother Teresa and as diligent as Thomas Edison. I feel progress, and I get excited about having more of it. And then tomorrow comes. It is as if improvement was a 24 hour bug that I slept off overnight. Once again, I’m back on the corner of average and ordinary wondering how I got there.
I cannot tell you how many times this pattern has played out in my life. I’m generally a positive person. But surround me with negative people and before long I completely blend in with the crowd. Whether it is with developing desirable attributes, achieving worthy goals or simply moving away from the masses in a positive direction, I am prone to regress towards the mean. But why? Why is it so difficult to keep a standard deviation’s separation between me and my standard self? Between me and the prevailing norms of my environment?
The Latent Heat Problem
I am sure that there are many contributing explanations and would love to hear any that you have. I’ll offer one possible reason and abuse one more academic discipline in the process. My theory is this: The energy/effort required to really change is not directly proportional to the distance you need to travel. Now, I’ve never taken chemistry, but I am going to use the concept of latent heat to illustrate this point. Turning water into steam is a two step process. First, you must heat the water from its current temperature to its boiling point, 100ºC. Second, you must provide additional energy (heat) to transform the boiling water into steam. During this transformation, the water does not actually change its temperature at all. Surprisingly, or not, it takes six times as much energy to vaporize water as it does to heat that water from 20 to 100ºC. Six times. In other words, it is a lot harder to really change, to really be different, than it is to just make progress.
This can be frustrating. It can be difficult to keep pouring in energy when you do not see corresponding results. And the second you stop giving your effort, you quickly slide right back down to where you started. I think this is why I often make improvements that do not really last. I do not put in the energy needed to overcome the latent heat hurdle. If I want to stop regressing towards the mean, I need to commit not only to boiling mediocrity but to vaporizing it. Full steam ahead.
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