There is a simple yet profound principle I learned as a teenager, one my father first learned the hard way after following a buddy into joyriding in a stolen car. It was a trip that somehow ended with the car partially submerged in a city fountain, and his takeaway was this: “If you’re going to follow a leader, make sure you know where he’s going.”

I set off from home a few years later understanding the importance of critical thinking, with a healthy skepticism toward what people say versus what they do, and a worldview modeled on the phrase trust but verify. But early on I also learned a few principles of employee management, one being the greatest indicator of future success is past performance. There is a problem with this last principle, however: people change.

We wrestle with this concept of personal change because human beings are not predisposed to forgive and move on. We have a hard time with it, and an even harder time trusting people to make better decisions later on since we don’t like to look at their journey.