During my MBA, like in many other B-schools, you couldn’t just register for any course you wanted at Wharton — you had to win them in an auction.
And naturally, everybody wanted the most sought-after courses from star professors, which cost nearly 10,000 points. By comparison, the majority of courses sold for just 100 points.
Since I messed up the auction (unsurprisingly), I got mostly the 100-point courses. So when I started these ‘loser’ courses, I naturally expected very little.
But to my surprise, most of these courses and professors were amazing. You would expect the 10,000-point courses to be orders of magnitude better than the 100-point ones — but there was no such correlation.
We see the same phenomenon play out in life — be it the popularity of career options, restaurants, or music. Certain things become popular for whatever reason — and when some people chase them, everybody else joins the chase.
And lo and behold, one thing becomes 100x more popular than the rest of the stuff. But this ‘pricing’ may have little (or very weak) correlation with reality.
When making big decisions in life, don’t go blindly with the market value of things.
Dig deep, and take your own decisions. The wisdom of crowds is not just imperfect, but sometimes, highly misleading.
– Rajan