Stay anywhere long enough and you accumulate a file. Not just what you did, but who leadership decided you are. That file becomes a ceiling. A stumble from three years ago still speaks before you do. Not malice. Just how memory works. But the asymmetry is brutal. You show up to every new problem carrying your full current capability, and they're solving for the ghost of who you used to be. You pitch an idea and instead of evaluating it, they filter it through whether someone like you could pull it off. The proposal never gets a fair read. Your file speaks first. And this is where speed dies. Fast teams run on trust, and trust is just a prior that gets updated quickly. When the update never comes, the people who leveled up get throttled while the people who merely avoided failure get the rope. Slowly, quietly, the incentive flips from doing great work to never leaving a mark on your record.

So here's the rule I hold myself to: judgment gets an expiry date. Six months, a year at most. Anything older is a stale prior, not evidence. Yes, history is information, and forgetting has a cost. But AI is compressing how fast people can level up, which means the honest window keeps shrinking. The person who struggled with something last quarter may have already closed the gap while you weren't looking. A skill that took two years to build can now be picked up in two months. Records go stale faster than they ever have. Judge the work in front of you, not the record behind it. Otherwise you're not running a team. You're curating a museum of everyone's lowest moments.

Museums don't ship.