President James Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, a man who believed he should have received a government appointment.
Congress responded. On January 16, 1883, President Chester Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. It required that federal jobs be awarded on merit, and that employees be selected through competitive exams.
On July 13, 2012, President Barack Obama spoke at a campaign event in Roanoke, Virginia. “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” he said. Later he said: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Democrats said the line was taken out of context and pointed to the words before it: “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.”
Republicans answered at their national convention in Tampa. Some form of “We Built That” became the theme of its first night, and major speakers returned to it.
In August 1963 Columbia Records released an album by the young boxer Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali. Its title was I Am the Greatest.
On February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach, he beat Sonny Liston and took the title. Afterward he told reporters: “I’m the greatest thing that ever lived … I shook up the world.”
Engineers at Google usually nominate themselves for promotion. Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of people operations, described the system in his 2015 book Work Rules! Google found that women “weren’t nominating themselves as often as the men around them.”
Alan Eustace, then head of engineering, wrote to the engineers: “We’ve noticed that women aren’t nominating themselves and, hey, you should be!” According to Bock, it worked. They sent the email “for about three six month periods and then Alan forgot to send the email.”
In the Army’s 2012 guidance for officer evaluations, the rated officer drafts a support form. The officer writes a duty description and a list of major performance objectives.
At the end of the period, the officer documents “how well he or she accomplished the major performance objectives,” “focusing on the most significant objectives and other contributions made.”
On March 15, 2022, Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced that thousands of state jobs would no longer require a four-year degree. “People shouldn’t be compensated based on their years of education, but what their skills are to do the job,” he said.
The federal government had moved toward skills-based hiring earlier. Executive Order 13932, signed on June 26, 2020, said that “an overreliance on college degrees excludes capable candidates.” It told agencies to assess candidates “in a manner that does not rely solely on educational attainment.”
The Oakland Raiders chose the quarterback JaMarcus Russell with the first pick of the 2007 NFL Draft. His six-year contract was worth up to $68 million, with $31.5 million guaranteed.
In May 2010 the Raiders released him. He is often described as one of the biggest busts in NFL history.
On January 9, 1969, according to most accounts, Joe Namath of the New York Jets spoke at a dinner of the Miami Touchdown Club. Super Bowl III was three days away. “We’re going to win Sunday. I guarantee it,” he said, as CBS Sports quotes him. Other accounts give slightly different words.
The Jets were heavy underdogs against the Baltimore Colts. Sources give the point spread as 17, 18 or 19 points. The Jets won, 16 to 7.
In 2012 Cameron Anderson and three colleagues published six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They found that “overconfidence leads to higher social status in both short and longer-term groups.”
The mechanism was how others saw the overconfident person. “Overconfidence leads to a behavioral signature that makes the individual appear competent to others.”
In 2010 Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap reported in Psychological Science that holding an expansive “power pose” raised testosterone and lowered cortisol. The study had 42 participants. In June 2012 Cuddy presented the idea in a TED talk. By 2017 about 47 million viewers had seen it.
In 2015 a larger replication found that people felt more powerful after posing, but it found no physiological or behavioral effects. In 2016 Carney wrote: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.”