[biren34]

First, ambitious people will find ways to figure out if they're succeeding. There are good ways and bad ways.

Second, objective rank ordering does exist. You can deny it or dismiss it, but it's there:

- Who's fitter? - Who's prettier? - Who can run/swim/bike farther? - Who makes more money? - Who got in to a "better" school / got the better job / got promoted faster? - Who's got more friends?

Then, the biggest zinger of them of all: who has more status?

Humans may never know the entire leaderboard, but we're exceeding good at knowing our local neighborhood on these kinds of ordering systems.

You can say that these things "don't matter", but to a vast fraction of humanity, they do matter. And as social animals, I'd argue that humans are more or less programmed to care about these things. Maybe not everyone, but imo, social status is core driver of human behavior, just like hunger and sex. And status is all about rank ordering.

[frereubu]

We're talking at cross-purposes. I don't really have much of an argument with what you're saying, but again, the idea of the post is that it's better if you can find a way not to do that at all. It's hard, and can take years, but it can be done.