I have been thinking about it so much that I had to put it in writing to finally get it out of my system - it being what makes a fair assessment of someone.

Most of the conventional markers which signal high value fall short when it comes to assessing someone. For example, academic pedigree is a good proxy of someone’s smartness or ability to work hard. If you aced a tough exam & went to a top school, you must be really something. Maybe not. Pedigree provides a vague approximation of someone’s point-in-time calibre. You went to a top school 10 years back —> you must have been something 10 years back. But what you did in those 10 years matters too - did you wing it since then, or stayed true to your core fabric & kept levelling up.

Let’s say your ability to crack an exam really does signal some rare intelligence with infinite half-life - now what! You surely are doing great on the intelligence axis, but would that alone make you worthy of an overall 10/10 assessment. I don’t think so. You could be abysmal with your emotions, or you could be negligent of your health.

Doing really really well on one axis is great, but does not really mean anything if you are struggling to meet the thresholds on the others.

So what makes someone really great or what is a true marker of someone’s ability to do great things in life? I don’t know. But this short note here is a reminder for me to be kind to myself & others - because sometimes we tend to zoom in a lot on the axes we fall short on, while totally neglecting the ones we are doing fairly okay in.

Life is a culmination of one’s performance across so many acts. We should keep performing, because someone famous once said - “All the world’s a stage!”