two kinds of judgement

there are two kinds of judgement in this world.

if you seperate them you'll preform better, and hurt less.

"judgement" as a general term, should really be broken up into two distinct categories.

the first category is what you probably think of when you hear the word "judgement".

the purpose of this kind is to judge you correctly, think court cases, referees in sports, or grades in school.

if you get misjudged, that means they did a bad job, and you can likely appeal the decision.

unfortunately most judgement is not of this type.

the second type of judgement is for the purpose of picking a sufficiently good group, not to judge each applicant fairly.

think job applications, sports teams, or dating.

imagine you're a coach picking a 20 person sports team.

some people will be obvious stars, while others will be obviously bad, the real "judgement" happens during the edge cases.

consider picking the final, worst, player for this team.

you should pick the 20th best overall, but maybe you accidentally choose the 21st best.

as the 20th best, it might feel pretty unfair to have someone worse picked over you.

but for the coach, the difference between the 20th and 21st best player is basically nothing.

the reality is most judgements happen this way, it doesn't matter if every choice is perfect, just that the overall pool is mostly correct.

so how should you operate around this type of judgement?

the key is to stop thinking of the person as a "judge" at all, and instead think of them as a customer.

imagine you're a professional chef, and you hear someone didn't like your meal.

you wouldn't say that the customer was being "unfair" for preferring a mcdonald's cheeseburger to your masterpiece.

similarly you should treat judges of the second kind as fickle, untrustworthy customers, whose opinion is based more on random luck, than any inherent value in yourself.

(note, the following part assumed you were reading this on linkedin)

the cool part is you, the person reading this post, is currently acting as this type of judge.

your decision whether to read, or skip, this post was an act of the second type of judging.

take a moment to reflect, how did you decide if you wanted to read this post?

it probably boils down to 'ohh shiny!'

well guess what, the person reading that job application you spent so much time on did the exact same thing.

so don't take rejections so personally, and assume you need to make your good parts glaringly obvious.

and as always, if you've read this far, thank you <3.

footnote:

as opposed to the indirect inspiration i usually take from paul graham's work's, this post is directly inspired by the essay Two Kinds of Judgement