What are your gaps? Developing high standards through scorecards

We say, "We all have strengths and weaknesses," but that's only true when comparing our competencies to each other.

In reality, if we rate our competencies against more objective criteria, our scores could all end up high or low.

So, what you perceive as a weakness could be fine or even strong. And what you perceive as a strength could actually be a weakness.

It all depends on your standards.

Strength Training and BJJ standards

I wake up and look myself in the mirror to brush my teeth. A vanity thought automatically starts coming through my mind – something about my strength.

But before I accept it, I evaluate it, and then banish it. I say to myself the numbers for my current lifts: my squat, my press, my bench – my actual strength in the way that I measure it.

I'm not strong yet. In fact, I'm quite weak. Given my standards for strength, I have a long way to go in my strength training.

After all, humans can be really, really strong. A quick check online for the top lifters shows these numbers for athletes up to 181 pounds, which is around my weight:

• Deadlift: 892 pounds
• Squat: 806 pounds
• Bench: 522 pounds

This is astounding. That's what a 10 out of 10 means – these guys are strong. Really strong.

Now, I'm not planning to be a world record powerlifter or close to it. However, choosing high standards for my goals is important to keeping me honest through humility and self-awareness.

I remember when I got promoted to Blue Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Blue is the first belt you get after white, and counter-intuitively, blue belts will often start losing much more frequently than they did as white belts.

The reason you lose more as a blue belt is obvious in hindsight: now that you're not a total beginner, your training partners cut you less slack, and you get beat much more.

I remember googling something like "losing more as a blue belt, am I getting worse?" and seeing a video that really hit me. The BJJ instructor in the video said:

"You may think you're now getting worse at BJJ as a Blue Belt, but here's something important to start with: you were never good at BJJ to begin with!!"

BAM! That hit me like a ton of bricks. Of course I wasn't good at BJJ – but I felt so good.

The problem, of course, was low standards and a lack of self-awareness and humility. Now that I'm more skilled, my previous belief and high regard for my skills seem outrageously delusional.

This delusion we have about the extent of our strengths, which comes from either low standards or a lack of awareness of how we measure up against them, is prevalent.

Finding reliable measures of competencies

What I like about strength training is that it has a clear proxy for strength: the number in your lifts.

Like one's time in a marathon, the room for debate on how well you do is very minor. A top-level hobbyist will run a marathon in 3 hours. A top-level athlete will run it in 2 hours.

One of the most important things you need to know, whether you have a strength or a weakness, is a reliable measure – a somewhat consistent evaluation of your current state.

Without a consistent measure, it's impossible to know where you really are!

Without knowing where you really are, you'll believe you're doing much better than you actually are – that's how humans work.

As Feynmann said, "You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." That's particularly true when we're fooling ourselves about how good we are at things.

There are advantages to fooling ourselves about how good we are — it's no coincidence that it was selected as a human evolutionary trait.

But it won't help you get closer to the truth or become better at what you're doing.

So, when defining whether you have a strength or a weakness, start with the question, "How do I reliably measure it?"

Then, you line up your measure to a scale.

Ideally, a high standards scale.

Defining context-free high standards

Many self-help books, including my favorite books on habits, James Clear's Atomic Habits, and Gretchen Rubin's Better Than Before, focus on incremental improvements: doing better today than you did yesterday.

But while comparing yourself to the past is a good strategy for improvement, it's a bad strategy for scoring. Many low standards are justified daily with "but this is better than before."

It's obvious, but often ignored, that to pursue high standards, you must have standards that are actually high. To define them, you need objective scoring scales that don't depend on your current context, that score competencies in an objective and time-independent way.

Scoring scales must be time-independent because "You're pretty good – for a white belt" is very different from "You're pretty good." Standards of progression are important, but only as a measure of how quickly you are getting to the actual high end of the scale.

Your external scoring system should also be assisted by benchmarks. Devoted humans are incredibly capable. What we believe can't be done, someone will go ahead and do.

Lack of benchmarks and mixing progression with performance celebration are frequent sources of low standards. A person finishes a marathon a says "Well, that's pretty good!" even though they finished with a 4:30h time – a poor time for the average hobbyist, where best in class is 3:00h. In that typical example, they're mixing progression celebration with performance celebration.

We should celebrate good progression but avoid celebrating bad performance – at least if your goal is to be a top performer.

A better way to frame the finish for someone who really wants to be good would be, "Great, this is my best time yet! I'm improving quickly, but got a long way to go.'

To know the difference between good and bad performance, you need standards that are assisted by benchmarks. A comparison with others on how they are performing is essential to ground your evaluation of your own performance.

And one of my favorite ways to define these standards is through scorecards.

Using scorecards to assist self-assessments

Sometimes, it can be hard to get objective, reliable measures of competence based on benchmarks, so I'll share a recent example I've used:

Math.

One of my recent pursuits was learning math to gain a more in-depth understanding of machine learning. I built a set of scorecards to determine how much I should know and what was good (redacted for brevity).

Mathematics and Statistics Scorecard (0 to 10 scale):

1-2 (Beginner)

• Familiar with fundamental concepts like algebra, basic calculus, and descriptive statistics.
• Can generate and understand simple graphical data representations like histograms and scatter plots[..]

3-4 (Basic)

• Can perform algebra, calculus (derivatives and integrals), and probability.
• Understands probability distributions and can calculate them in majority of cases[..]

5-6 (Intermediate)

• Understands advanced calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory.
• Can apply statistical methods like hypothesis testing, regression analysis, and basic time-series analysis.
• Can interpret, visualize, and manipulate data using statistical techniques[..]

It's hard to quantify mathematical knowledge, but the scorecards give me guidance – a high-level understanding of what good looks like for my personal goals.

While I don't have a scoring measurement for math that is as reliable as strength training, the good thing about math is that textbook exercises give me a good idea about my current ability and gaps.

In summary: What are your gaps?

It's hard to answer the question "What are your gaps?" without a scorecard. Scorecards are a great tool because they force us to answer 3 critical questions:

1. What are the areas you're trying to be good at?
2. What does good look like?
3. Where are you on the scale?

Without an answer to "what area," "what scale," and "what current measurement," you can't know how you're doing.

The first step is knowing how to measure your performance. It is essential to find a consistent measure that yields the same results no matter how many times you measure yourself.

While some things like strength are easier to measure, others like math are harder – but they're also measurable through textbook exercises, for example.

By using benchmarks, you can also define what good looks like in a way that's "really good" instead of "kinda good."

Benchmarks and objective performance criteria are required if you want to have high standards for yourself.

Finally, once you have a list of scorecards, you should be able to define scores and scales for the areas you want to be good at.

With scorecards, you can easily see your strengths and weaknesses based on consistent measures, objective criteria, and high standards.

So try it out:

Find something you want to be good at, be it a professional skill like programming, a personal pursuit like riding your bike, or a hobby like improv, and then create a scorecard for it:

1. Define how you will measure it consistently
2. Find benchmarks to define high standards
3. Build a scale from 0-10
4. Score yourself!

Then, the next time you say, "I did pretty good!" or "I need to improve," you'll know exactly why.