Do You Have an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard?
Or, what do you care what other people think?
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Yet another week has passed in quarantine, and it looks like things are getting worse everyday. My cousin who lives in the US had severe symptoms of the virus, but luckily she tested negative. India took precautionary measures early on which was very tactical, but sadly US is suffering the consequences of a delayed response.
If somebody tells you that the night is the darkest just before the dawn, either they are trying to save you from the truth, or they are naive. Tough times are indeed ahead—in terms of both health and economy. Therefore being prepared and alert would definitely help.
Take care of your health. Take care of your family’s health. Don’t fire your employees, your cook, your maid, or your house help. They need you more than they ever did.
That said, now is the time for your weekly dose of multidisciplinary reading to upgrade your thinking and decision making.
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Q: How do you remain ambitious without chasing fame and success?
Human beings have a deep biological need they have to satisfy by acting in such a way that will bring them praise and adulation — for their wealth, their success, their skills, or their looks.
This inherent need also helps us push ourselves. It gives us the drive to accomplish. We’re willing to do extraordinary things that are extremely difficult, like starting a company from scratch, climbing Mt. Everest, solving a supposedly unsolvable theorem, or trying to settle on Mars.
This is all well and good. But a byproduct of this behaviour is the need to compare ourselves with others. The problems come when we start compromising our own standards, those we have set for ourselves, in order to earn more admiration tokens that others.
Truth is, we can be anything we want, but we can’t be everything. When we compare ourselves to others we’re often comparing their best features against our average ones. We naturally want to be better than others, but the unconscious realisation that we are not can become self-destructive.
Also, comparing ourselves to others allows them to drive our behaviour — which is definitely a bad sign.
Warren Buffet has a beautiful saying in this regard: The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.
Maintaining an outer scorecard means being concerned by how the world sees you and what the world thinks of you — basically, how you are perceived in comparison to others — and then acting according to that.
On the other hand, an inner scorecard is something which you maintain for yourself, without thinking much about what people will be thinking of you.
As a kid I read a quote (which I think was) by the late and great leg spinner Shane Warne. It went something like this: You have to decide for yourself whether you’re bowling well or not. The batsman’s going to hit you for fours and sixes anyway.
I can’t say that I understood it completely, but it did make an impact on me. Warne (assuming he’s the one who said it) basically says that the scoreboard is just a superficial judge of the game. Winning the game doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve bowled well. Losing the game also doesn’t mean the opposite. You have to set a standard for your own skillsets and achievements, no matter the result, no matter how many sixes and fours the batsman hits. You should be your own judge — neither the scoreboard, nor the batsman.
Having an inner scorecard forces you to ask yourself: How good do I want to be? What standards am I going to set for myself? What am I going to hold up as important? These questions are as essential in sports as they are in business and investment.
If you measure yourself by an inner scoreboard, you’ll have a strong tendency towards self-reflection, and be able to identify areas where you need to improve. Your inner scorecard propels your growth. You can win or lose by luck, but to set yourself up to high standards, you gotta go beyond luck and be better judge of yourself. Having an inner scorecard helps you outdo luck.
Warren Buffet asks an important question in this regard: Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or, would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?
You don’t have to answer it, but I would urge you to meditate upon it for some time. There are no clear and easy answers to this, but it’s a good thought experiment to find out what drives you. Are you simply dancing for admiration, or are you really trying to get good at what you do?
You don’t necessarily have to choose one over the other, but the benefit of holding yourself to high standards even if you win (a promotion, a game, or a funding) is that it actually makes the losing easier.
No matter what people say, you’re definitely gonna lose at some point. If you aren’t losing, most likely you aren’t playing any hard games — which means you aren’t growing.
True loss isn’t when you lose a game or a promotion. True loss is when you don’t make an attempt to live up to high personal standards.
Maintaining an inner scorecard not only protects you from feeling envious of others’ achievements but also provides you with a clear awareness of your own boundaries. It enables you to recognise the frequency of your shortcomings, anticipate the number of sixes a batsman might hit, and accept these outcomes without undue distress.
Your inner scorecard also empowers you to concentrate on the silver linings amid defeats. The best part is that this mindset cultivates a complete independence from external results in shaping who you become.
What you should care about is the process — of getting better, of being the best version of yourself in the given circumstances, or making the best out of what life gives you. If you don’t let the world judge you, you don’t let it have power over you.
I’m sure all successful people deeply enjoy their wealth and status. But all of that can be ruined very easily by making too many compromises, by living according to an external scorecard rather than an internal one. Because all things we pursue, such as success, money, fame, and beauty are merely the numerator. When you make a lot of compromises, the denominator of your life equation — regret, compromise, jealousy, unhappiness, anxiety — becomes too large, and your life satisfaction score ends up being tiny. Even if you have all the admiration of the world, pursuing the outer scorecard for false admiration is going to unbalance the equation of your life.
Now, coming back to Buffett’s question, I am not in anyway suggesting that you don’t need an outer scorecard. What I am suggesting is that you should seek self-admiration before seeking admiration from others; you should seek self-respect before seeking others’ respect. You should not let your external image come in conflict with your internal image.
On this note, Nassim Taleb wrote: Most people get it backwards and seek the admiration of the collective and something called “a good reputation” at the expense of self-worth for, alas, the two are in frequent conflict under modernity.
The good thing is that if you start maintaining an inner scorecard, it will automatically translate into boosting your outer scorecard as well. And what better example to validate this idea than Buffet himself.
Buffet isn’t concerned if the world would look at him as the greatest investor or not. He doesn’t care what the world thinks of his decisions or ideas. He has openly said that there are a bunch of things Charlie Munger and he could do that would generate a lot more money for the company, but he chooses not to compromise his standards.
Another famous personality is Richard Feynman who also held the same life philosophy. He didn’t plan on winning the Nobel Prize, nor did he plan on becoming one of the most famous physicists of our time. In fact he got bored and frustrated when he had to work for a lofty cause such as the progress of science or the betterment of the society. In his own words, he was just playing with physics, trying to satisfy his inner curiosity. One of his famous oneliners is: “What do you care what other people think?” which, if you ask me, is the very idea of having an inner scorecard.
More than more happiness, more fame, and more wealth, we need less anxiety, less worry, and less regrets. And we’ll have that only when we’re successful by an inner scorecard.
We can’t just earn praise, we must strive to be praiseworthy as well. Similarly, we can’t just be loved without being loveable, and we should not be admired without being admirable. This simple shift in mindset makes all the difference in the world. We must, as Charlie Munger puts it, “earn and deserve the success we desire.”
Tiny Wisdom
Unlike pseudo-intellectuals who seek validation, fame and fortune, and “intervene” to help the society, but often end up harming it instead, it’s the humble man who actually helps the society by staying away, thereby inflicting no harm.
The humble man minds their own business, and limits their circle of competence to what is truly important. The humble man is not a bullshit vendor.
From the Internet
The Virus Shows That Making Our Companies Efficient Also Made Our Country Weak — “Efficiency is an unforgiving master. It crushes everything not in service of an immediate bottom line. But if there is a single economic policy lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that the United States’ obsession with efficiency over the past half-century has brutally undermined its capacity to deal with such a catastrophic event.”
Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? — I’m not the biggest fan of his books, but I do like Cal Newport’s blog posts. “Could the IndieWeb movement—or a streamlined, user-friendly version of it to come—succeed in redeeming the promise of social media? If we itemise the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them.”
Start-Ups Are Pummeled in the ‘Great Unwinding’ — “Dozens have laid off thousands, slashed costs and changed their businesses to try to survive the pandemic. All that may not work.”
Yet Another Novel I Will No Longer Write — “Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence.”
The Hollow Politics of Minimalism — “Millburn and Nicodemus call themselves the minimalists, but they aren’t the definitive article; they’re part of a larger trend that has swept the United States over the past decade.”
Quote to Note
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function
— Albert Bartlett
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋