Exercise 6 — The retirement ledger

This one you will not finish today, and it is the actual product of the chapter.

Take a drill you are running now and make two columns. From here on, at each rep: run it, then write your own unaided verdict — pass or fail, plus anything you noticed — and only then apply the success condition and record what it says. Never in the other order. Twenty reps, however long twenty occasions takes.

Retire the drill when both of these are true across the last ten: your call matched the condition every time, and at least once your call caught something the condition scored as a pass. The first tells you your perception has become as reliable as the prosthetic. The second tells you it has become finer than the prosthetic — which is the thing you were building toward the whole time.

Because that is what a success condition always was. You made it external and mood-proof precisely because at rep three your read is worthless: that went fine and I want this to be over are indistinguishable from the inside. The condition stands in for a perception you do not have yet. And the day comes when the perception overtakes it and the two begin to disagree — and the perception is right — and you cannot detect that day by consulting how you feel about it, because your enthusiasm will have an opinion and will be wrong in whichever direction is more comfortable. The ledger is how you find out without asking.

How to tell it's any good. An honest ledger has disagreements in it. If your first ten rows match perfectly, either you peeked at the condition before writing your call, or the drill is under-loaded and everything is passing — go up a rung and start the count again. If your call runs consistently harsher than the condition, do not read that as sensitivity; check first whether you have quietly gone back to grading your mood. And when you do retire it, run nothing in its place for a fortnight before you build the next one. The capacity needs a stretch of unscored occasions to show you whether it is yours or the drill's.