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to prominence and recognition, which leads in turn to more opportunities to succeed, more resources with which to achieve success, and more likelihood of your subsequent successes being noticed and attributed to you. Isolating the effects of this accumulated advantage from differences in innate talent or hard work is difficult, but a number of studies have found that no matter how carefully one tries to select a pool of people with similar potential, their fortunes will diverge wildly over time, consistent with Merton’s theory. For example, it is known that college students who graduate during a weak economy earn less, on average, than students who graduate in a strong economy. On its own, that doesn’t sound too surprising, but the kicker is that this difference applies not just to the years of the recession itself, but continues to accumulate over decades. Because the timing of one’s graduation obviously has nothing to do with one’s innate talent, the persistence of these effects is strong evidence that the Matthew Effect is present everywhere.16

Typically we don’t like to think that the world works this way. In a meritocratic society, we want to believe that successful people must be more talented or must have worked harder than their less-successful counterparts—at the very least they must have taken better advantage of their opportunities. Just as when we try to understand why some book became a bestseller, when we try to explain why some individual is rich or successful common sense insists that the outcome arises from some intrinsic quality of the object or person in question. A best-selling book must be good somehow or else people wouldn’t have bought it. A wealthy man must be smart in some manner or else he wouldn’t be rich. But what the Halo Effect and the Matthew Effect should teach us is that these commonsense explanations are deeply misleading. It may be true that abjectly incompetent people rarely do well, or that amazingly talented individuals rarely end up as total failures, but few of us fall into those extremes. For most of us, the combination of randomness and cumulative advantage means that relatively ordinary individuals can do very well, or very poorly, or anywhere in between. But because every individual’s story is unique, we can always persuade ourselves that the outcome we have witnessed was somehow a product of their unique attributes.

None of this is to say, of course, that people, products, ideas, and companies don’t have different qualities or abilities. Nor does it suggest that we should stop believing that quality should lead to success. What it does suggest, however, is that talent ought to be evaluated on its own terms. One doesn’t have to know Roger Federer’s ranking to appreciate that he is a great tennis player—you can tell that simply by watching him. In the same way, if everyone who knows Bill Miller agrees that he is an exceptionally smart and thoughtful investor, then he probably is. As Miller himself has emphasized, statistics like his fifteen-year streak are as much artifacts of the calendar as indicators of his talent.17 Nor is it even the case that his talent ought to be judged by his cumulative career success—because that too could be undone by a single unlucky stroke. As unsatisfying as it may sound, therefore, our best bet for evaluating his talent may be simply to observe his investing process itself.18 What we conclude may or may not correlate with his track record, and it is almost certainly a more difficult evaluation to perform. But whenever we find ourselves describing someone’s ability in terms of societal measures of success—prizes, wealth, fancy titles—rather than in terms of what they are capable of doing, we ought to worry that we are deceiving ourselves. Put another way, the cynic’s question, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? is misguided not only for the obvious reason that at least some smart people care about rewards other than material wealth, but also because talent is talent, and success is success, and the latter does not always reflect the former.19