The Wrong Leaderboard

My brother grew up playing lacrosse with a kid who became the best player in the history of the University of Virginia's program.

For those who don’t know, UVA lacrosse has produced some of the best players the sport has ever seen. To be the best to ever come through there means a lot, especially to a local kid. To add to this, after two seasons in the professional league, his childhood friend is already the league MVP.

My brother didn't follow the same path, his diverged. He made different choices, built a different life, and, by any honest measure, he's doing very well.

But he carries around a “what if” that I don't think he's ever fully let go of.

Not because he failed, but because someone he started next to went on to win at a game my he chose to walk away from. Somewhere along the way, that became evidence of something to him. Proof of a verdict on a choice he made before he was old enough to understand what he was choosing.

That's the wrong leaderboard and it's the cruelest version of it, because the comparison feels legitimate. They came from the same starting point: same town, same school, same sport, and same age. The fact that one path produced an MVP and the other produced a different life entirely reads, in the wrong light, like a scoreboard.

But it isn’t, even if feelings don't care about logic.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I've been on the receiving end of my own version of it.

The judgment in my case is mostly financial and it doesn't come from strangers, it comes from people close enough to have an opinion about how I'm doing.

There's a particular cultural pressure that comes with living in Utah, where my family spent time, that I didn't fully understand until I was inside it. Material success isn't just celebrated there, it's the primary metric (under a religious facade where if God loves you, then He rewards you with material success). What you drive, the toys you own (boats, RVs, etc.), whether you've bought a house yet, and how quickly you're accumulating the visible markers of a life going according to plan.

I felt the pressure to buy a house before I was financially comfortable doing it and when I couldn't, it didn't feel like a responsible decision. It felt like a personal failure. Like I was falling behind my peers.

Behind on whose timeline? I couldn't have told you, but the leaderboard was clear to everyone around me, and I wasn't near the top of it.

Virginia is a different experience. People here would rather not draw attention to their financial situation (good or bad). The scoreboard is less visible, which makes it easier to ignore. It's still there (it's always there), but have to look for where it's being kept.

Here's what I've come to believe:

Every culture, every social circle, every family hands you a leaderboard when you're young enough that it feels like reality instead of a choice:

The problem is, most people never question whether they want to be in that game at all.

The men I know who are the most stuck aren't stuck because they're losing. They're stuck because they've been grinding hard at a game they never chose, and somewhere in the back of their mind, they know it. The score doesn't feel right even when it goes their way, the wins don't land the way they should, and the losses sting more than they should.

At its core, that's what it feels like to be on the wrong leaderboard.

You're not failing, you're just playing someone else's game that you didn’t consciously choose.

The influencer version of this is almost too easy to point out, but it's worth naming because it's the most visible form of the problem.

Someone with a specific set of genetics, a specific relationship with food, a specific amount of time and financial resources, a specific set of relationships, and a direct financial incentive to look a certain way tells you that your failure to look like them is a discipline problem.

Most people don't actually want to look like Chris Bumstead (even if they fantasize about it). They want to feel healthy, have energy for their kids, and not be in pain. That's a completely different game with completely different metrics and it's a game most people could actually win if they stopped measuring themselves against a leaderboard designed to make them feel perpetually behind.

The fitness industry's business model, like most of the self-improvement industry, requires you to feel like you're losing. A person who feels like they're winning doesn't buy the next program, doesn’t feel compelled to buy the newest supplement stack, or commit themselves financially to a system that gives them results they don’t actually care about (but have convinced themselves they should care about).

So what's the actual leaderboard?

I don't think there's a universal answer and I think that's the point.

Designing your game means deciding what the scoreboard measures before you start keeping score. Not inheriting one, not accepting the one your in-laws use, or your friends, or the one the algorithm decided to show you this week.

For me, the metrics that actually matter look something like this:

Am I building something that will outlast the season I'm in? Are the people closest to me better off because I'm in their lives? Am I getting better at the things I've chosen to get better at (not the things someone else decided I should care about)?

Those aren't impressive metrics to most. You can't post them and nobody's going to look at them and know whether you're winning.

That's exactly why they're the right ones for me.

My brother is good at a lot of things his childhood friend isn't.

He chose differently, he built differently, and he has a life that wouldn't have been possible on the other path. The other path wouldn't have produced what his did (and it’s dishonest to mourn a life you didn’t choose to commit fully to).

That's not a consolation prize, it’s just the truth of what it looks like when two people play different games.

The only way it becomes a loss is if you keep checking the wrong leaderboard and comparing yourself to people playing different games.

It’s as if you're a man comparing yourself to a woman and feeling like you’re losing because you can’t get pregnant.

Figure out what your game actually measures.

Then go win that game.

Until next week,

Ian