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Today I found a post on LinkedIn that hit a nerve.
If you're not best at what you do, nothing matters bhai !
I literally mean it, coz I felt it myself.
This is not some post which I am posting coz I am happy, sad or any XYZ emotion.
If you're not on top, you're just an average guy, and trust me no one respects an average guy.
If you're average, just keep your head down, and keep working until you can say,
"Yes, I belong to 0.1% of my field".
Not to motivate, or demotivate. It's just what I felt.
Keep GRINDING bhai!!
I read it twice.
The first read got me fired up, which is exactly what a post like that is built to do.
The second read left me with a question I could not shake: is this actually true? Do I need to be in the top 0.1% of my field for any of my work to matter?
So I went looking. Not for motivational quotes, but for what people who genuinely got to the top of their industries say about how they kept score along the way.
What I found changed how I read that post entirely.
The problem with "top 0.1%" is not the ambition
Let me be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying aim lower. The intensity in that post is real and I respect it.
The problem is not the height of the bar. The problem is that "top 0.1% of my field" is a terrible thing to point your daily effort at, because you cannot actually do it.
Try it right now. Open your calendar for tomorrow and schedule "be in the top 0.1%".
You can't. There is no task there. There is no first step. There is nothing you can start at 9am and finish by lunch.
You can schedule "read the Raft paper", or "rewrite that gnarly service with tests this time", or "review three PRs properly instead of rubber stamping them". Those are things.
"Top 0.1%" is not a thing you do. It is a thing that gets said about you, later, by other people, after a lot of stuff outside your control goes your way.
Buffett's answer: which scorecard are you using?
The first thing I ran into was Warren Buffett's idea of the Inner Scorecard, from Alice Schroeder's biography The Snowball.
Buffett frames it as a single question:
The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.
Then he makes it concrete with a test that is hard to wriggle out of:
Lookit. Would you rather be the world's greatest lover, but have everyone think you're the world's worst lover? Or would you rather be the world's worst lover but have everyone think you're the world's greatest lover?
Swap in your own field and answer honestly.
Would you rather be a genuinely excellent engineer that nobody has heard of, or a mediocre one that everybody thinks is excellent?
Most of us want to say the first one. Very few of us actually behave like it.
The Outer Scorecard is your rank, your title, your follower count, your comp band, what people say about you when you leave the room.
The Inner Scorecard is your effort, your intensity, your training, your consistency, and whether you were honest with yourself about all four.
Here is what makes the difference practical rather than philosophical.
The Outer Scorecard moves even when you do nothing.
Somebody more talented joins your field and you drop a slot. A hiring freeze lifts somewhere else and you drop two more. A guy who is worse than you posts better and passes you anyway.
The Inner Scorecard only moves when you move it.
Nobody can take a day of real work away from you. Nobody can devalue the hour you spent actually understanding something instead of pretending to.
Buffett did not pick this up from a book, by the way. He got it from his father Howard, who he described as "a hundred percent Inner Scorecard guy", a congressman who kept voting his conscience into losing causes and never seemed bothered that it cost him.
Bezos says the same thing in engineer language
Buffett's version is about character. If that feels a bit soft, the same idea shows up in a much more mechanical form.
Jeff Bezos, in the 2009 Amazon shareholder letter:
We take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.
And he is blunt about why:
I have no idea how to drive up the stock price. I can't manage that directly. It's not a controllable input. But I can make your picking algorithms more efficient, and that will reduce cost structure.
That last sentence is the whole thing.
The stock price is an output. It is the score other people give you. You cannot touch it.
Picking efficiency in a warehouse is an input. You can walk over there tomorrow and improve it.
The method Bezos describes is just working backwards until you hit something you can actually put your hands on:
You keep working backwards until you get to something that's controllable.
So let's run that on "top 0.1% of my field".
Top 0.1% is the output. What feeds it? Reputation, who happened to give you a shot, and the timing of the market you walked into. Those are half yours at best.
Keep going backwards. What feeds those? Hours of deep work. Hard problems you actually shipped instead of talking about. Feedback you asked for and then used. Showing up again the next day when it stopped being fun.
That bottom row is where you live. You can do every single one of those tomorrow, without anyone's permission, and nothing in the world can stop you.
Once you write it out like that, the top row stops looking like a goal and starts looking like a weather report.
Both men are describing the same trap
Read them together and it is one idea wearing two outfits.
Buffett: do not let other people hold your scorecard.
Bezos: do not aim at a number you cannot move.
The failure mode is identical either way, and I have watched it happen to good engineers.
You pick an outer metric. Staff title, follower count, top 0.1%, whatever it is.
You work hard. The metric does not move, because it depends on six things that have nothing to do with you.
Now you have a problem. The honest read is "the inputs were fine, the output lagged". But the outer scorecard does not offer that read. It just shows you a number that did not go up.
So you conclude the work was worthless. You either burn out or you start optimising for the thing that actually moves the number, which is almost never the work itself.
That is how you end up with people who post about engineering more than they engineer.
What I actually do with this
I am not going to pretend I have solved this. I check my own outer scorecard more than I would like to admit.
But one small thing has helped, and it is basically Bezos with the corporate serial numbers filed off.
At the end of the day, I do not ask "am I getting closer to the top 0.1%".
I ask: did today's inputs deserve a good output?
Did I do real work, or did I do busy work that looked like real work?
Did I learn something I did not know this morning?
Was I honest about the thing I got stuck on, or did I quietly route around it?
Some days the answer is no. That is fine, it is information, and it is information I can act on tomorrow.
The important part is that this question has an answer I own. "Am I top 0.1% yet" does not.
Keep the grind, move the scoreboard
None of this is an argument for wanting less.
The grind part is real, and if you have the intensity for it, that is a genuine advantage over most people. Do not talk yourself out of it.
Aiming for the top 0.1% is a fine direction to have. It is just a bad thing to measure yourself by.
Being in the top 0.1% is an output. It depends on a lot of things we don't control, like timing, competition, and luck.
The inputs are what we do control: our effort, our training, our intensity and consistency.
If we get those right, over time the output takes care of itself.
So keep the intensity. All of it.
Just move it off the scoreboard and onto the thing that actually feeds the scoreboard.
Now I want to hear from you, because I know this community is full of people quietly keeping score on themselves.
Which scorecard are you running on right now?
And if you switched from outer to inner at some point, what was the thing that made you switch?
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LiveReview: Blast-Radius Aware AI Code Review for Business-Critical Systems
LiveReview is an AI code reviewer that scores every hunk of a diff by blast radius: how far a change reaches through your call graph, how much persistent state it touches, and how well-tested it is. A 3-line change to a shared auth check can outrank a 300-line UI tweak. Your team's attention goes to the highest-risk code first, not spread evenly across every diff.
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