Judge progress by your internal scorecard to stay steady through praise and setbacks

Applause is a lousy compass. It feels amazing and tells you almost nothing about whether you did the work that matters. A junior developer once got showered with praise for a flashy demo while skipping tests and breaking deploys. Two weeks later, the team spent a weekend firefighting. She reset with an internal scorecard: clean tests, two refactors a sprint, smaller pull requests. The compliments slowed, the incidents dropped, her credibility rose.

An internal scorecard lists standards you fully control. It protects effort from mood swings in the market or the crowd. This doesn’t mean ignoring feedback. It means filtering feedback through your standards instead of letting it define them. One entrepreneur kept a “receipts” folder of customer thank‑yous and turn‑around times during a season of harsh press. It kept the team steady and gave them concrete wins to show stakeholders.

Here’s the tricky part: sometimes the crowd cheers when you cut corners. Sometimes it goes quiet when you do the right thing. Your standards keep you from veering with each gust. I might be wrong, but the best performers I know are boringly consistent. They decide what “a good day” means and then stack good days.

In behavioral terms, this swaps outcome dependence (which breeds anxiety) for process dependence (which breeds resilience). Lead measures give immediate, controllable feedback loops. Pre‑ and post‑mortems de‑bias noisy events by anchoring assessment to predefined criteria. A receipts file leverages the availability heuristic in your favor when doubt creeps in.

Decide on three standards you control and one lead metric that proves you met them. Before each cycle, write what a good effort looks like, and after you ship, review against your standards rather than the crowd’s reaction. Quietly collect receipts that show your work met the bar, so you can stay steady in loud seasons and speak clearly in reviews. Set your standards tonight and start tracking tomorrow.