Pick your own scoreboard, or you’ll end up chasing stats you never cared about.

If you do not choose what counts, something else will choose for you, and the default measures are usually whichever ones are easiest to display. People spend years competing hard on a metric they would not have picked, and the exhaustion at the end comes from having won something they never wanted.

Write down the two or three things that would make a year good by your own reckoning. Be specific and slightly embarrassing about it. Then check whether your current effort is aimed at those or at somebody else’s numbers.