People are really bad at updating their initial assessment of you, even when it should change a great deal.

It was like he couldn’t shake his image as the young, inexperienced salesperson who’d joined the startup in its infancy, he says. Eventually, he left to launch his own company, GetDynasty, an online provider of trusts.

That is extremely common. Nearly all of the time, people see you as you were when they first met you, no matter how much you’ve progressed or improved yourself. It’s true in in personal life and in roles at companies. This is why most of the time the only way to get promoted or get a significant pay bump is to go somewhere else.

In one of my early IT roles I worked with a manager who insisted on seeing me as level one helpdesk, even though in the four years I worked there I went from being helpdesk (though my skills were always far above level one or even helpdesk) to having a CCNA and an MCSE and being asked for by name to troubleshoot difficult server problems. But she never updated her view of me at all. I went from working there straight into being US IT manager for a medium-size company at 26 years old. Was very proud of that, making such a big jump.

And I bet if we’d stayed in contact she’d still see me as helpdesk, some 24 years later.