How do you improve your samples?

10.1 What makes a high-quality sample?

“I’ve been in this industry for 20 years.” “I’ve met plenty of people like that.” “I’ve taken more hard knocks than you can imagine.”

Statements like these carry weight almost automatically. More years, more experience: surely judgment should grow along with them. Yet reality does not always work that way.

Some people grow more alert to change over 20 years of work. Others spend those years applying an explanation they settled on long ago. Some learn to read people more accurately after a few partnerships; others come away with nothing beyond “You can’t trust anyone.” The difference is not whether they have experience. Once an experience is remembered and carried into a later judgment, it can become a life sample. What matters is its quality, and how much weight it deserves.

Entering the system does not automatically earn a sample greater weight

In Section 3.4, we defined a sample as a unit of real-world experience that has been observed, recorded, or retained and can enter a later process of recognition. That definition deliberately does not require the sample to be correct. We do carry misunderstandings, accidental successes, partial impressions, and other people’s experiences into our next judgment. All can become samples, of varying quality. The question for this chapter is therefore no longer what qualifies as a sample. It is which samples deserve greater weight in the next judgment. I find five standards useful.

First: keep facts separate from interpretations

A salesperson meets a prospective customer for the first time. The customer rejects the quote. “The customer said no” is a fact. “This customer is difficult,” “They have no need for this,” and “They’re just trying to drive down the price” are interpretations. The problem with many low-quality samples is not the absence of facts. It is that we package a fact together with our interpretation the moment it appears. Eventually, the interpretation may be all we remember.

If a sample cannot distinguish “what happened” from “how I understood it,” it can easily lead us to apply an old experience incorrectly to a new situation.

The first requirement of a high-quality sample is therefore straightforward: preserve the facts as faithfully as possible, and identify the interpretation separately.