A Scoreboard of Your Own

For most of my career, success was measured on a scoreboard other people built.

It was a good scoreboard, as these things go. Title. Salary band. The next seat at a bigger table. It had the great advantage of clarity: you always knew the score, because everyone around you was keeping it too. I sat in most of the seats it offered, analyst, CFO, COO, CEO, the board, and each one was meant to be the arrival. Each one, for a while, felt like it. The scoreboard never lied about the score. It just never mentioned that the game had been chosen for me.

What changed my definition was not a seat. It was noticing something about the people I most admired. They were not the ones ahead of me on the ladder, though some of them had climbed very high before I met them. They were the ones who had put the ladder down.

They had a quality I could not name at first, and eventually recognised as self-authorship. They measured their year against their own intention. When they took on more, it was because the work called for it, not because the next rung did. When they said no, there was no anxiety in it. They had, at some point, sat down and decided what a good year actually was, in their terms, and then had the quiet discipline to keep score against that instead of against the people at the next table. It gave them a steadiness that no promotion I ever received gave me.

Here is the encouraging part: that steadiness is buildable, and the build starts with an exercise that takes ten minutes. Write down the three markers you currently use to judge whether you are doing well. Be honest, the real ones, not the ones that sound good. Then, next to each marker, write who chose it. Some will be yours. Some will turn out to have been installed years ago by a parent, a first boss, an industry, a city, and simply never reviewed. There is no verdict in this, only information, and the information is the beginning of choice.

Because the point of the exercise is not to throw the old scoreboard away. Some of what is on it may be exactly what you would choose again, and choosing it again, on purpose, changes how it feels to chase. The point is that at least two of the three markers should have your name next to them, and if they do not yet, you have found the most worthwhile piece of design work available to you: deciding, as the person you are now rather than the person who set out, what winning means this year.

The people who do that work do not become less ambitious. In my experience they become more so, because ambition pointed at your own intention has a source of energy that borrowed ambition never has. The scoreboard of your own is not a smaller game. It is the first one you actually chose to play.

Continue reading: The Person in the Room →

I write here a few times a week about designing a working life that fits. The essays continue at alifethatfits.today/essays →