Check your high school yearbook. Which of your classmates was voted “Most Likely to Succeed?” How are they doing now?
Last week, the Wall Street Journal took a look at survey data from MemoryLane.com and Christy Lleras’ 2008 study in Social Science Research. Between the two data sets, about 9,000 people were sampled.
What they found was that about one-third of the people voted most likely to succeed now consider that honor to be a curse. About 40 percent call it an
inspiration.
In other words, more than 70 percent of the “Most Likely to Succeeders (MLS)” have been affected someway by the title.
Some interesting psychological research will come from these findings. What does being named MLS mean for how you see yourself? Wouldn’t you love to see a study with 200 MLS and 200 second place finishers? They have to be almost identical in future prospects going into the vote, but the title might really affect where they go in life. It would be fascinating.
Given the research, we can’t ignore that being named MLS weighs on the recipients of the title. But should it?
Being voted MLS by a bunch of high school seniors isn’t like being voted MLS by two dozen Fortune 500 CEOs, world class doctors, or even moderately successful twenty-somethings.
High school seniors don’t know anything about success. Their life experience consists of a weekend job bagging groceries, two semesters of Spanish, and that one weekend before finals they only got four hours of sleep because they really wanted to go to that party.
These are the people weighing on the psyches of the MLS. I’m not sure if that’s irony, coincidence, or some other word I didn’t learn because I was thinking about the cute brunette from first period during English class senior year.
The MLS, for whatever reason, take their title seriously. That’s crazy. I was voted MLS, and I honestly hadn’t thought about it until I read the Wall Street Journal article last week.
Truth be told, I had forgotten. It was a silly questionnaire we filled out one day during lunch. It didn’t mean anything, but Lleras and MemoryLane.com have data to prove it does matter to most of those voted the MLS.
If you’re one of those people who spent your 20s worrying about living up to the
title your highly intelligent and thoughtful peers bestowed upon you, it’s time to let it go. Your life will not and should not be defined by what 400 18 year olds said about you years ago.
Just think about it this way, if they voted you most likely to succeed, and then you let it affect your emotional health, they were probably wrong in the first place.
