Predicting career progression using multiple regression

If my stats Professors - Bob Stine or Richard Waterman happens to read this blog, I'm sure they will be amused about how people like me misuse statistical methods. The title of the post is quite misleading as my intention behind post is not to come up with a regression equation that can predict one's salary after ISB based on some variables.

Swami Vivekananda talked a bit about comparison and the grief attached to it in the book "What Religion is." In that book he says that the most common reason for sadness among people is that they are not better than others in comparison and not that they are doing well. This is the same with almost everyone who is doing this comparison thing. I too have spent many hours in grief by comparing myself with others but slowly realized that comparison is useful only when the subjects are manmade but not men themselves; a little philosophical thought.

But then after finishing MBA and having been exposed to stats and other concepts along with the MBA jargon, I felt that I can do a little better. While there is no change in my opinion that "Comparing oneself with others" is powerful enough to take away all the happiness and confidence in you and in its place fill you either with frustration or overconfidence, which surely will lead to more problems.

Yesterday during the gyan session while people were asking about the roles and salaries, I suddenly realized that each person was trying to compare himself with someone similar and then predict their future based on that. At that point it occurred to me that if we plot the results each student got at ISB after few years, the dots will be all over the place. Not just in two dimensions that we can see but in huge number of dimensions. If we attempt to fit a line through these results we will come up with numbers that are like the average salary, highest domestic salary etc etc. Even to come up with something like that we need to use so many variables and I doubt if any of the factors that we can think of can significantly explain the differences.

Each of us is unique and it is not quite possible to compare us with others. Just look at the stars in the sky. Each one of them is unique; while you may compare them with some simple dimensions such as size, distance from earth, if one considers the fact that the light we are seeing is not the present but surely the past and it is at different time frames, you will understand how silly it is to compare the stars. I think comparing yourself with others or others with you is equally silly and stupid. There are so many variables and some about which we have no clue about and any attempt to fit a line would be in vain.

Only message I want to pass on through this post is, whoever you are, whatever you are and whatever your goals are - you are unique and you cannot measure your happiness and success in comparison with others, you should measure it in your own terms and one's conscience is the best scale that will say it all without even asking. So friends, next time when you say you're doing good/bad/ok etc, ask your conscience what would it say. Only thing you need to do is to know about yourself to gain some meaning from what your conscience says.

I'm not sure if my idea is clear enough and would definitely like to hear what you think

Cheers