The Setup
Imagine you are appearing for an exam. But the rules of this exam are a little strange — let me explain how.
For every correct answer, you will get zero marks. You may ask why?
My response would be you did prepare for the exam, you are supposed to get it right. You prepared, didn’t you?
So correct is just the baseline. Expected. Unremarkable. Zero.
But for every incorrect answer, you will get negative marks, this usually happens in many exams. But, there is a twist, that should make you uncomfortable — there is no bottom to how negative it can go. It doesn’t depend on how wrong you are in any objective sense. It depends entirely on how wrong the evaluator thinks you are. And that’s a very different thing.
I am going to pause for a while to let my hypothesis sink in…
Now, if you appear for this exam a hundred times, a thousand times, and so on. And if you average out your score after that — you would always land somewhere in the negative. The best you could ever hope for, on your very best day, is zero.
You’d probably say — this is absurd, it does not make any sense. Why would anyone sign up for an exam like this?
And I’d smile and tell you — you already have. We all have. You appear for it every single day.
My exam situation is an example to explain the underlying concept. In fact, the questions are actually the events that happen around you — the situations life drops on your doorstep without asking.
You don’t write the answers on any paper, instead the choices you make, the words you say, the things you do or don’t do are the answers.
And the evaluators? Who are they? You may ask.
They are the people around you. Sometimes someone close, sometimes a stranger, sometimes someone you’ll never even meet. The rules about who gets to evaluate you are flexible, almost non-existent. Anyone can pick up the pen.
Welcome to the exam no one told you about.
I can sense a little bit of cynicism on your face, let me walk you through another example, which you could relate to better.
Have a look at our Mr. X. He has been at his job for five years. He is reliable, thorough, and rarely makes mistakes. He delivers on time. He covers for colleagues. He responds to emails on weekends. Over those five years, he has done thousands of things right. How many of those things earned him praise? A handful, maybe…
Most were simply absorbed into the expectation. The baseline kept rising quietly, and no one marked it. His consistency became invisible.
One unfortunate morning, he missed a deadline. Not because he was careless, but because he was buried under three other tasks no one else would take on. One miss. And suddenly, the narrative shifts. In a meeting, someone says, “Well, he’s been slipping lately.” Lately. One incident becomes a pattern in the evaluator’s mind, and a thousand right ones vanish.
You may say, hey, this is called recency bias. And you would be right. But let me ask you something. If recency bias is truly how we operate, then it should show up everywhere — not just when we judge people. Every corporate decision should be short-sighted. Every strategy meeting should ignore last year’s data. Every investment should chase the latest quarter and forget the last five years. But that is not what happens, is it? Companies routinely make long-term plans. They study decade-old trends. They build five-year roadmaps. The same minds that can hold ten years of market data somehow cannot hold five years of a colleague’s reliability. Recency bias, it turns out, is remarkably selective. It shows up most reliably when we are evaluating people — and conveniently disappears when we are evaluating spreadsheets.
And the exam does not stay within the walls of your office. It follows you everywhere.
You are driving home. You have been driving well for an hour — calm, patient, following every rule. Then, at one intersection, you make a slightly impatient lane change. Nothing dangerous. Just quick. The driver behind you honks, gestures, perhaps mouths something you are better off not hearing. In that moment, a stranger who has witnessed exactly one second of your driving has evaluated your entire character. One answer. No context. No history. Verdict delivered.
Your loved ones evaluate you with too much history — they carry every mistake you have ever made. Strangers do this with none at all — they carry only the one they just saw. Both are unfair. For opposite reasons. And you are caught in between.
Now consider the modern version of this exam. Social media. Someone posts a hundred thoughtful, helpful things over the years. Insightful comments, kind words, useful advice. Then one day, they post something clumsy. A poorly worded opinion. A joke that does not land. A take that ages badly within hours. The hundred good posts are invisible. Nobody screenshots kindness. But the one bad post is circulated, quoted, dissected. A thousand strangers who never saw the good are now grading the bad, and they are grading it with the confidence of people who believe they have seen enough. They have seen one answer. They are certain it is the whole paper.
Nowhere is this exam more relentless than in our closest relationships. Think of a marriage or a long partnership. I am not a relationship counsellor or a psychoanalyst, but I would like to propose a simple test. Our main characters will be Mr. X and Mrs. Y.
Please don’t ask why X and Y.
Being an Engineer, it is more convenient this way, and sincerely I don’t want to hurt anyone, because even if I choose a very random and weird name, I suspect someone from 8.3 billion must be having this name, so I am going to stick with X, Y, Z etc. throughout this book.
Back to our story. Mr. X and Mrs. Y are a happy couple. Their world is filled with love, happiness, co-operation. One fine day their close friends Mr. D and Mrs. E visit them. Mr. D wanted to play table tennis in the community game room, so both Mr. X and Mr. D went there. Mrs. Y and Mrs. E wanted to see the first episode of a new Netflix web-series that just came out.
Now our environment is set. Our characters are in place.
With the power vested in me as the author of this book, I will use my superpower — I will make Mr. D and Mrs. E ask the questions I need asked. The questions won’t be direct, of course. They will be polite, polished versions of two simple ideas:
“Are you fully happy with your spouse?”
“Do you think there can be some improvement, with respect to his or her contribution in managing the household?”
Dear reader, if you expect the answers to be Yes and No respectively, I am extremely sorry for wasting your time. If not, we can continue further…
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Since you are reading this line, I think I have gotten my answer.
Let’s focus on a relationship which is more fundamental. The child and parents.
Parents usually provide, protect, and participate throughout the growing process. Years of this. Then, one day, their teenager asks for something and they say no. Perhaps it’s a party they don’t feel safe about. Perhaps it’s money for something frivolous. The child’s response? “You never let me do anything.”
“Never…” A single word that erases years of correct answers. The evaluator is fifteen years old and has absolute power in that moment.
The cruelty of it, isn’t that the people we love, get to evaluate us. It’s that their judgment has more weight precisely because they’re close. A stranger’s negative mark is a scratch. A loved one’s negative mark is a wound that knows exactly where to land.
Now imagine living with this system for decades. What does it do to a person?
First, it teaches you to become hypervigilant. You start scanning every room, every conversation, every email for the possibility of a wrong answer. You become less spontaneous, less honest, less yourself. You begin optimising not for correctness but for the avoidance of negative marks. There is a profound difference between doing something right and doing nothing wrong. The first requires courage. The second only requires fear.
Second, it creates a deep sense of unfairness that you can never quite articulate. You know, somewhere in your bones, that the ledger is rigged. That your good work is being treated as invisible while your failures are being treated as defining. But you don’t know how to correct the system. Everybody you know is part of it, right?
Third, and perhaps most painfully, it makes you a harsh evaluator of others. Because once you’ve internalized this system, you start applying it. You start grading the people around you the same way you’ve been graded. Your partner forgets something, and you don’t think of the thousand things they remembered. Your friend cancels, and you don’t think of the dozen times they showed up. You become the examiner you once resented, and the loop is closed.
And if you are being honest — truly honest — you will notice that there is a fourth evaluator I have not yet named. One who is harsher than any boss, any spouse, any stranger on the internet. One who replays your mistakes at two in the morning, long after everyone else has moved on. But we will get to that. Not yet.
