Life doesn’t have a leaderboard, so quit checking your rank.

School hands you a ranking every few weeks, so it is easy to assume the rest of the world runs the same system. It does not. There is no shared scoring across people with different lives, different starting points and different aims, which means the rank you keep calculating is invented by you and then taken seriously by you.

Catch the moment you turn something into a position this week, in the gym, the grade, the group chat. Ask what you would do next if the ranking did not exist. Then do that, because it is almost always the more useful answer.