The scoreboard remembers outcomes more cleanly than the bodies that produced them.

The scoreboard keeps a clean record and the bodies keep a different one. The result reads as a simple number while the people who produced it carry the strain, the injuries, and the cost, none of which appear anywhere in the record. Outcomes are archived and the price of them is not.

Watch for this in how you judge productivity, at work and in yourself. The tally of what got done says nothing about what it cost to do, and a good year on paper can be a bad year in the body. When assessing whether something is working, ask about both columns, since only one of them tends to get written down.