Standard or Standing

Ego rarely announces itself. It presents as diligence, as high standards, as caring more than other people about doing it properly. Which is why it is almost never audited: the behaviour it produces is often good, and the motive is invisible from the inside.

The operative mechanism is a shift of objective. You started out trying to make the thing good and somewhere in the middle the goal became the impression the thing makes. The work may continue to improve; the decisions quietly stop being about the work.

The audit is a single counterfactual, asked honestly and repeatedly: would I still do this, to this standard, if nobody would ever know? Whatever survives is your standard. Whatever does not is your standing, and it has been steering.

Standing-driven decisions are systematically worse in a specific way: they optimise for legibility rather than for effect. The visible fix beats the important one, the impressive approach beats the boring one that works, and the mistake gets managed rather than reported.

The audit also frees you from a great deal of unnecessary work. A significant fraction of most people's effort is spent on the presentation layer of things nobody is examining.

And it identifies where you are genuinely reachable. Every place where your standing is at stake is a place where someone can move you, and knowing where those are is straightforwardly useful.

Run the audit at the level of decisions rather than of projects. "Do I care about this work" is too coarse; "why did I choose the harder-looking approach here" is where the information is.

Watch for the three markers of a standing-driven choice: it is more visible than necessary, it is more complicated than necessary, and it is harder to reverse than necessary. Ego dislikes reversal because reversal is legible.

The clearest single tell is how you handle your own mistakes. Standard-driven: report it early, fix it, move. Standing-driven: contain it, manage the framing, hope it resolves before anyone asks.

Not telling people is a genuine skill and it needs practising, because the natural moment to mention something is exactly where the audience gets installed. Notice how strong the pull is to work one accomplishment into a conversation.

Do not overcorrect into invisibility. Refusing all credit is its own performance, and it is frequently a more sophisticated bid for regard than simply saying what you did.