30 under 30 is going to inherently attract the wrong sort of people because the people actually worthy of it don't care about it. It basically acts as social proof, which the most successful people already have from their own work. Similar to Mensa in that the majority of the smartest people aren't going to feel the need to be validated by taking the time to join
Someone I worked with very closely for many years really wanted to be Forbes 30 under 30. They never got it, but got plenty of other random awards that didn’t matter. I never really understood it, because it was so clearly BS; it didn’t help with marketing or PR past like a week, and we had plenty of that from news stories and actual, real PR. And it wasn’t a real award; it’s not like there was something to be proud of there.
I eventually figured it out - it was a notch in their belt that they wanted so that they could point to it as proof of worth. They sought out those various “pay us $2000 and we’ll put you on the cover of our magazine” nonsense things too, even getting them framed and putting them up on the wall, due to what turned out to be feelings of inferiority and a need to feel like they were making progress, even if it wasn’t the right kind of progress.
Needless to say, those didn’t help us at all and were a waste of time and money. Focusing on customers and PR that got in front of them worked much better.
I saw a stat that if you look at Forbes' "... Under 30" list, collectively, they have been accused/charged/convicted of stealing/scamming more money than their companies have generated revenue.
And then I saw a tweet a while back, that I admittedly can no longer find, that if you were to filter for "Stanford" in that list, the ratio blows out to nearly 3:1 (ill-gotten gains:revenue).
This doesn't even get into the fact that there are consultants who will basically bribe previous 30 under 30 winners to vouch for you, so it's partially pay to play.
I've met so many X under X in my life, working in big banking and big consultancies ("the big 4") and they range between useless/yes-men/yes-women/Peter Principle achievers at 29/butt-kissers/diversity-hires/sociopaths/psychopaths and many other despicable (non-meritocratic) attributes.
So anytime I see on a magazine articles like that, I safely ignore the whole thing (and ofc I never click X u X articles - I got better things to waste my time on)(I just wanted to leave this comment here to save other people the time of focusing on X u X lists and people)(exceptions are always there, but a safe bet is that if you shake the hands of 28 out of 30, you better wash your hands afterwards.
