Designing Your Scoreboard
In a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Before that, Daniel Defoe wrote in his 1726 book The Political History of the Devil, “Things as certain as Death and Taxes, can be more firmly believ’d.” I’d like to add that having a scoreboard is just as certain. We might be in denial about death, we might ignore the taxes, and we might not even be aware of our scoreboard, but they’re all there. Think about your scoreboard in terms of satisfaction and expectations; with a clearly understood scoreboard, I know if I'm winning, losing, or even in the game!
Conversely, if my scoreboard isn't clearly articulated, it only means that I have no clear expectations of what "winning", or success, looks like. Without knowing something this basic, how can I be predictably satisfied or dissatisfied? My level of contentment and satisfaction would be completely at the whim of my current emotions. I don’t know about you, but my emotions can be pretty volatile; sleep, hunger, creature-comforts, weather, and even music can alter my emotions. When I don't know what my scoreboard is tracking or it's tracking the wrong things—things I don’t truly and deeply (read: actually) care about--adding points to the board may not actually provide any increase in satisfaction or joy or genuine progress.
In Good vs Effective, our last post, we explored why it’s so important to have the right scoreboard—trust, love, health over fleeting wins like status or wealth. Chapter 5 of Shane Parrish’s Clear Thinking uses mortality to help us design a scoreboard worth wanting. By reverse-engineering our lives, like a project pre-mortem, we can define what matters and build a legacy that sparks ripples of purpose. We’ve learned to pause, compound small moments, and think clearly. Today, we’ll look into how to design the right scoreboard.
Memento Mori: Facing Mortality to Find Purpose
Reflecting on death sharpens your focus on what’s worth wanting: trust, love, health. A bookstore owner might chase effective foot traffic with trendy displays, but pausing to ask, “What would I do with one year left?” decides to host community readings, aligning with a new-found purpose. Or, “reaching the masses with great books” might dictate that foot traffic is important and a book club is the vehicle to develop appreciation for specific books for an inspired few. Memento Mori asks, “What should be on your scoreboard?”—not necessarily likes or dollars or titles, but impact.
Take a Minute: Imagine you have one year left. What’s on your scoreboard? What decision can you align with it?
Reverse-Engineering and Pre-Mortems
I can’t help it, I’m an engineer at heart. I like to know how things work. What better way to understand the principles of something than to take it apart and reverse engineer it? To do so Parrish draws on end-of-life wisdom from hospice patients who regret chasing status over relationships, playing it safe, or neglecting growth. I remember going to a youth group at church many years ago and the question was asked, “If it was illegal to be a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Take that question and apply it to your scoreboard, to what you claim is important to you. If I claim that I was “all about loving my family”, would there be enough evidence to satisfy that claim? If I wanted to be a “good example of health and well-being”, would there be evidence of that? “I’m a bold adventurer” – “oh, really?” Reverse-engineering your life means asking, “At my end, what will I need to have prioritized? What will others say mattered to me?” as evidenced by my actions and decisions.
Another tool I’ve used in my work-world is the “pre-mortem.” Again, it’s a thought experiment that imagines the end – a successful end, to be sure. In project planning, a pre-mortem imagines things like:
- what went well,
- what didn’t go well,
- what could go wrong,
- what were the anticipated obstacles,
- what obstacles weren’t anticipated but experienced,
- what are the biggest risks,
- what could be the consequences of failure at any specific point,
- how can we mitigate those,
- what did progress along the way look like,
- what turned out to be meaningful milestones.
That takes a lot of work for a software project and it’s no easier for life. But it does point us in the right direction for managing our scoreboard! The pre-mortem helps set expectations and allows us to start to mitigate risk and prepare ourselves for upcoming challenges – along the road to ultimate success.
Take a moment: Consider what you say is important to you – is there enough evidence that others would be compelled to say the same? Can you identify what’s going to make it hard to live that out and start to mitigate against those challenges?
Clear Thinking as Right Priorities
As Parrish reaches the summation and conclusion of his book he leads us to consider our life’s ambitions and decisions in the context of knowing what we truly want to accomplish. This means designing a scoreboard with the right metrics—trust, love, health—not society’s defaults, not emotional default, ego defaults or inertia defaults. Know what you’re doing and why. That's Clear Thinking!
Jordan Peterson urges us to seek responsibility and adventure over happiness. Seneca warns, “It is not that we have a short time to live, it is that we waste a lot of it.” Parrish urges us to “want what matters.”
Take a Minute: What’s one metric (e.g., time with family) you can track to ensure a good decision today?
Clear Decisions, Meaningful Impact
Small moments, a ritual, a pause, defining your legacy. Here’s a checklist to design a scoreboard worth wanting:
- Define Your Scoreboard: Pause to articulate your highest purposes.
- Face Mortality: Use Memento Mori to ask, “What’s worth wanting if time is short?”
- Reverse-Engineer Legacy: Imagine your end—what will you and others say mattered and what the challenges will look like? Align decisions now.
- Track the Right Metrics: Focus on purpose-driven metrics, like time with loved ones, not status. Avoid metrics that cater to your emotional, ego, inertia, and social defaults.
- Make It a Habit: Ritualize reflection to compound clarity, like a priority-setting re-evaluation ritual.
Pause, but Don’t Stop: Jot it down! What are the metrics that will move you in the right direction? It may be a challenge to create your scoreboard, but you’ll know when you’re working hard and feeling tired, that you’re working on the things that matter most! And if you find out they’re not, you can always re-evaluate, something you’d never know you’d need to do without a scoreboard!
Parrish’s Clear Thinking shows that we need to deliberately and methodically sharpen our focus on explicitly determining our purpose. Our goal doesn’t have to have global impact, it’s about meaningful impact, in the direction you actually want to be heading. Seneca’s right—don’t waste time. I hope you have found this series interesting and helpful as we have explored pausing, compounding, prioritizing but ultimately has been about choosing what matters and moving in the right direction – that’s right – aiming up!
