The Problem With Keeping Score

Performance, nature vs. nurture, and letting go.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

If you’re performance-oriented, like many people who subscribe to this particular blog, you may wrestle with the impacts of the last year or so.

For me, I get into a mental trap where I think to myself “if I accept that this past year of living in the pandemic has impacted my performance, then I’ll also be accepting that I don’t have control over my performance.”

This is a sneaky thought. Like the best lies, there’s a sliver of truth in it. While it’s true that we don’t have control over everything, it’s not true that we have control over nothing.

The difficult part about this is that I’ve never, ever, ever found a clean line that can be drawn between how much performance is due to external factors and how much is due to internal factors. Don’t get me wrong, naming the factors is easy (COVID, isolation, the economy) it’s gauging their impact and comparing their impact that’s impossible.

You can’t say “it’s 50% COVID, 20% the economy, and 30% internal factors.”

There’s no way to assess this! All of these things interact with each other and there’s no clear delineation. It’s like the Nature vs. Nurture debate. It’s not either one alone and it’s not even 50% nature and 50% nuture. They interact and impact one another so the pie chart is an inadequate visualization tool. It would be more accurate to say it’s 100% nature and it’s 100% nuture at the same time.

In the same way, we have to see our performance over the last years as 100% COVID and 100% the economy and 100% internal factors. There’s just no way to pull them apart.

Yes, we all know we should pay attention to what we can control and ignore what we can’t—but that’s not how performance-oriented people operate! We care about the outcome! We care about the number that says how we did.

Of course, this is the struggle. It’s not a logical fight, but when has performance ever been logical? Performance is about willpower! Performance is about brute force! Performance is about precision!

The only antidote I’ve found to this is letting go of the number. You know the number. The one we use to measure our performance. It could be sales closed, songs written, kids taught, app store downloads, TED talks given, etc.

You might not even be conscious of all the numbers you’re tracking for yourself in your head. I certainly didn’t. Paying attention to how we keep score is not just a path to self-awareness, it’s also a path to verifying that we’re focused on the right numbers.

Either way, the number isn’t the most important thing. So, maybe we don’t let go of the number entirely, but we just loosen our grips.