Yesterday was my birthday.

Birthdays have a funny way of putting you into a rhythm of reflection whether you intended to be reflective or not.

You naturally start taking stock of what’s changed, what hasn’t, what you see differently, and what you care about considerably less than you did a year ago.

And somewhere between that and being aggressively over-caffeinated this morning, one thing has been particularly top of mind for me: 

You can try really fucking hard and still not be good at something.

You can spend twice as long as someone else and produce half the quality.

You can prepare more and still perform worse.

You can give something your absolute best effort and have your best not be good enough.

Effort and competence are not the same thing.

We understand this pretty easily when we’re looking at someone else’s work.

It gets considerably harder when the effort is our own.

“But I worked really hard.”

And?

That doesn’t mean it’s good.

Of course effort matters. It’s how you practice, learn, and develop skills you don’t currently have.

But the purpose of effort isn’t to guarantee an outcome.

It’s to create the highest probability of one.

You prepare as well as you know how.

You make the best decision you can with the information available.

You apply whatever skill and judgment you’ve developed up to that point.

And then reality gets a vote.

You might have been right. You might have been wrong.

Your preparation can be excellent and something outside your control can still change the outcome.

Or the outcome can be entirely within your control and your current ability simply wasn’t good enough to produce it.

You can do everything right and lose.

You can do a mediocre job and get lucky.

The result is just information.

It is not a retroactive measurement of how hard you tried.

And the amount of effort you put in doesn’t obligate reality to give you the result you wanted.

Thinking otherwise is what gets us into trouble.

Because when we collapse effort, competence, and results together, the result starts carrying far more meaning than it should.

“I worked really hard and it didn’t work.”

becomes:

“Maybe I’m not good at this.”

And then:

“Maybe I’m not good enough.”

Those are three completely different conclusions.

We have to stop making our work responsible for answering questions it cannot answer.

Your work can tell you whether you have the skill required to meet the current standard.

The outcome can give you information about whether what you did was effective.

Neither is qualified to tell you what you’re worth.

The second your competence becomes evidence of your worth, it gets considerably harder to become more competent.

Feedback becomes personal.

Someone being better than you becomes threatening instead of informative.

Having to redo something becomes embarrassing instead of useful.

Being a beginner feels like inadequacy.

You defend things that need to change because somewhere along the way, you stopped evaluating the work and started defending yourself.

One of the most useful things you can learn to say is:

“I tried really hard. And it still wasn’t good enough.”

Both things can be true.

Then figure out what reality is telling you.

Did you lack skill?

Did you make a bad judgment call?

Was there something outside your control?

What would you do differently next time to increase the probability of a better result?

Those are questions about the work.

Whether being bad at something makes you feel bad about yourself is a completely different problem.

And learning to separate the two might be just as important as learning how to get better.