The crowd’s memory can reduce a long career to one badly timed second.

A crowd will compress twenty years into one bad moment. The career is long and the memory is short, and the single visible failure becomes the whole account, replayed and repeated until it displaces everything else. Collective memory is not proportional; it keeps the vivid and discards the sustained.

This is worth knowing both as protection and as caution. Your own worst moment is unlikely to be the summary you deserve, whatever the recollection around you suggests. And when you find yourself holding a single incident as the definition of someone, it is worth asking what the other twenty years contained before letting the one second stand for all of it.