Be a thinker, methodic in your motives.
We spend an extraordinary amount of energy comparing ourselves to others.
He got promoted faster?
She is looking fit!?
He is investing in what, must be nice?
She has how many followers?!
Metrics, metrics and more meaningless metrics.
If you are in a numerate profession you probably have applied z-scores in your trading or science experiments. But have you used it to manage your own being?
What’s a Z-Score, dawg?
At its core, a z-score measures a quantity against itself. Not against something else’s performance, but against its own historical pattern.
If you normally sleep between 6 and 8 hours per night, with 7 hours being your average, then a 9-hour night is exceptional for you.
It doesn’t matter that your friend routinely sleeps 10 hours. Your 9-hour night represents a significant positive deviation from your personal baseline.
The z-score captures how far away any particular data point is within your own distribution.
In technical terms, a z-score tells you how many standard deviations away from your mean a particular measurement falls. Human translation: it tells you how different this moment is from your normal, and whether that difference is meaningful or just noise.
We ain't the same color clarity of diamond.
We drown in external benchmarks. We chase highlight reels. We promote job promotions that typically have nothing to do with our decision-making.
Retirement gurus tell us we should have saved X by age Y, yet personal finance is sparingly taught in secondary schools. MBA students are taught how to cook balance the books of billion dollar companies, yet most have no clue how to mitigate tax for personal effect.
Someone else’s progress is a function of their advantages, not yours. When we chase the ideals of others we are unconsciously optimizing for their distribution.
It’s all about distribution, distribution, distribution.
Descendant from kings, we at it again
Just hand me the crown, I’m active again
-Pusha T
Measuring Against Your Own Distribution
Your z-score forces you to compete only with your past self.
It doesn’t matter that someone at the gym can do 50 pushups. That’s their distribution, not yours. What matters is that you’re improving relative to your own baseline and your own variance.
This applies to everything.
Your savings rate, your work output outcomes, your relationships, your mental health metrics.
Am I as successful as them?Am I better than I was last month?
Why This Framework Works
It’s personalized. Your baseline is yours. Your variance is yours.
It accounts for context. If you’re going through a difficult period and your performance drops, the z-score reflects that in your new distribution. You’re not held to an external standard that ignores your reality.
It highlights meaningful change. Small fluctuations are just noise around your mean. But when you see a genuinely high z-score (positive or negative), you know something significant has shifted. You can literally see yourself in the data.
The Profound Simplicity
I think what’s quite profound about this is the philosophical shift it requires. We’re so conditioned to look outward for validation, for benchmarks, for proof that we’re “enough.” The z-score approach says: the only meaningful competition is with your past self.
Pick one metric that matters to you.
Ideally, something you can measure regularly. e.g. money saved per month.
Track it for a few months to establish your baseline and your normal variance. What’s your average? What’s your typical range?
Then, as you continue tracking, notice when you significantly exceed or fall short of that range. Those are your high and low z-score moments. Investigate them. What caused the spike? What led to the dip? What can you learn about your own patterns?
The Only Race That Matters
At the end of the day, you’re not trying to be them.
You need to be a better version of you. And the z-score can help you see whether you’re actually getting there.
Click here for the z-score template you can copy and use to compete with yourself. The cool thing about z-scores is that you can overlay other meaningful data on top to better elucidate the why behind your scores.
If you right or you wrong, if you riding come on
By the end of this song, can't be hiding for long
-Rick Ross
