There’s no report card after graduation. Somebody still has to grade the work, and it’s you.

School supplies a steady stream of external verdicts, and then one day it stops. The standards do not go anywhere. They only lose their spokesman, and plenty of people mistake the silence for permission to stop measuring anything at all. Without a grader, the drift is slow enough to miss for years.

Pick one area that matters to you and write down what good would look like in it. Then check yourself against that on the first of every month, honestly and briefly. A standard you set and actually apply beats one somebody else enforced.