On self-worth

Of late, I have been thinking about self-worth in the context of fitment with career and partner selection.

It is hard to make decisions when choosing the right school to go to, or the right job to pick. It is even harder to commit to the right life partner.

Typically, there can be three scenarios when you set up ambitious goals:

1. You achieve your desired outcome - You realise your potential and the outcome is in line with your self-worth
2. You end up way off - There is a high chance that your calibration of self-worth is flawed
3. You fall marginally short - You believe your self-worth is higher and the current outcome doesn’t justify it

I will not discuss the ideal state (1) but will focus on scenarios 2 and 3.

2. You end up way off

The key underlying question here is ‘How do you measure your self-worth for a particular context?’

I believe that there are two elements to determining it–social proofs and proxies.

Social proofs

Let’s take an example. Suppose you aim to become an elite NBA basketball player. Let’s assume that your physical attributes are as follows - height: 5’2”, weight: 72 kg, stamina: low. You can give it a try, but the existing social proof (attributes of elite NBA players) suggests that your physical attributes will come in the way of you succeeding. If you determine your self-worth such that you see yourself becoming a basketball pro, you are most likely to fall short.

This is an extreme hypothetical example but my point is that you can do a contextual benchmarking for determining your self-worth for a particular goal. In regular scenarios, this is a much harder thing to do. In addition to the natural qualities that you possess, your attitude, willingness to put in the work and the ability to de-construct situations are equally strong contributors to the self-worth determination. However, you can establish a good baseline through research, self-reflection, and discussions with key people in your life.

This point should not be misconstrued and lead to the undervaluation of your self-worth–especially when treading uncharted paths. Being distant from the benchmark doesn’t matter as much as the magnitude of the distance.

Elon Musk believes that he can colonise Mars. He has no social proof to believe so as no one has done it before. But his ability and self-worth lie very close to what an ideal benchmark¹ would look like. Developing this instinct of understanding the ideal benchmark and then evaluating yourself against it is important.

Proxies

You can validate your self-worth determined from social proof through proxies.

Let’s say you have a fair idea of the kind of partner that you can land based on what you see around you. People with similar backgrounds, physical attributes and personality types are dating or are married to certain types of people. That helps you form your hypothesis.

A good way to validate this is through proxies like asking this archetype of people out or trying out dating platforms. You can then evaluate the kind of responses you are getting and adjust your self-worth accordingly. This is the design thinking way of leading life.

Another thing to be mindful of while determining your self-worth is that you should not let others influence it to a large extent. At times, when there is subjective evaluation involved–for e.g., in job interviews or on dating platforms, a few rejections should not be equated to lack of worthiness. The absence of fitment or the inability of the other party to judge you for your worth are sometimes fairly common reasons for the outcome.

Incompetent confidence is an epidemic. There are a lot of incompetent people in decision-making positions due to a wide variety of reasons. Some of them couple this incompetence with brazen confidence. It is in your best interests to stay away from such people. If that is unavoidable, don’t let their actions influence your self-worth.

3. You fall marginally short

Most situations in life usually fall into this bucket. There is a dissonance in your evaluation of your self-worth and the outcome that you have achieved. We need a nuanced approach in this case.

I didn’t rank high enough in the JEE to attend a top IIT, which devastated me, as my life up to that point had been focused on preparing for this exam.

I had the option to drop a year and go at it again. Or, I could attend some other decent college². I chose the latter because I feared not replicating even this level of performance the next year. Over time, I have realised that my thinking was flawed. I did not objectively account for the social proof and proxies when determining my self-worth.

My inability to get the desired outcome had more to do with my approach than my inherent ability. I was unable to make that distinction then. I recalibrated my self-worth. Which in hindsight was not the best decision.

With certain irreversible choices like the school you go to or the life partner you select, it is easy to resort to the readily available option when things get tough. They inevitably do. And that is precisely when your accurate assessment of self-worth needs to be the force that makes you wait it out and go again.

Why is going again important? Because attending an outlier school and striving for better compatibility are heavy-tailed distributions. Ben Kuhn explains it wonderfully in this essay:

The most important thing to remember when sampling from heavy-tailed distributions is that getting lots of samples improves outcomes a ton.

In a light-tailed context—say, picking fruit at the grocery store—it’s fine to look at two or three apples and pick the best-looking one. It would be completely unreasonable to, for example, look through the entire bin of apples for that one apple that’s just a bit better than anything you’ve seen so far.

In a heavy-tailed context, the reverse is true. It would be similarly unreasonable to, say, pick your romantic partner by taking your favorite of the first two or three single people you run into. Every additional sample you draw increases the chance that you get an outlier. So one of the best ways to improve your outcome is to draw as many samples as possible.

As the dating example shows, most people have some intuition for this already, but even so, it’s easy to underrate this and not meet enough people. That’s because the difference between, say, a 90th and 99th-percentile relationship is relatively easy to observe: it only requires considering 100 candidates, many of whom you can immediately rule out. What’s harder to observe is the difference between the 99th and 99.9th, or 99.9th and 99.99th percentile, but these are likely to be equally large. Given the stakes involved, it’s probably a bad idea to stop at the 99th percentile of compatibility.

This means that sampling from a heavy-tailed distribution can be extremely demotivating, because it requires doing the same thing, and watching it fail, over and over again: going on lots of bad dates, getting pitched by lots of low-quality startups, etc. An important thing to remember in this case is to trust the process and not take individual failures, or even large numbers of failures, as strong evidence that your overall process is bad.

This last paragraph is particularly important. You should not question or adjust your self-worth (assuming you have attained mastery at determining it) if things are not going your way because more often than not, they will not.

I see a lot of people settling. I was one of those people. Thinking about self-worth this way has helped adjust my approach. Now, I trust the process–the underlying operating model. I am okay with playing the long game. It helps in getting through the hard times with belief.

¹ An ideal benchmark of an individual who colonises Mars would have attributes such as being a polymath with expertise in math, physics and engineering; possessor of huge amounts of capital and the ability to raise more; visionary, driven and slightly fanatic.

² I attended DTU and had a great experience. I picked up on life skills beyond academics that I wouldn’t have otherwise because of the kind of people I was surrounded with.