When I was setting my goals for the year and drafting my roadmap, I made a solemn pact with myself to publish one blog post per week throughout 2024, with four joker cards up my sleeve — basically, one potential month off. Ambitious but honest, and aligned with my urge to make more space for writing in my life and to practice discipline in different ways.

Ideally — and yes, a little naively — I pictured myself keeping a 2 to 4-post buffer so I’d never find myself sprinting to my keyboard on a Wednesday. And yet here I am, Wednesday 10 a.m., just starting my writing process. I got sick, I didn’t have a buffer. Worse, I couldn’t build one. I have to laugh, because I never stop telling my friends to be gentle with themselves, especially when life swerves. Classic case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot.

This little situation made it easy to pick today’s topic. In the dead of winter, after that end-of-year crescendo that always feels a bit apocalyptic, that’s when we get sick, we’re exhausted, and the “dramas” happen. This post is for anyone for whom slowing down feels like a torture designed in hell, often the victims of a very particular kind of astigmatism: the kind that warps the contours of their own reality.

What is the capability gap?

If you’ve known me a while, you know one of the rare newsletters that’s stayed in my good graces for years is the one Sahil Bloom sends every week (in English). In early December I read his take on the “capability gap,” promptly filed that email in my “very good ones” folder where I keep the best newsletters I get and revisit regularly. One day I’ll tell you about my rainbow-coded email filing system — a work of art.

“Capability gap” translates literally as an écart de capacité in French, which, let’s be honest, doesn’t hit quite the same (this is precisely the kind of realization that fuels my anglicism habit and turns me into that half-adorable half-infuriating blonde who speaks Franglais without a shred of guilt). It’s the relative gap between what we’re currently capable of and our potential when carrying out a task — crystal clear as explained that way, right? (Not really.)

Let me try again. It’s the gap between:
• what you think you can do
• and what you’re actually capable of doing at this exact moment.

And for all sorts of reasons, we tend to underestimate the first and overestimate the second. As Bloom explains, we think our capability gap is tiny when in reality it can look a lot like the Grand Canyon.

Letting a Grand Canyon-sized capability gap sit in your life — and your business — gives error a mile of runway. It’s a blind spot that can have disastrous consequences for your biggest decisions and strategies. Shrinking that gap takes courage and discipline, yes, but also realism and honesty. Spotting a gap takes real wisdom and, often, a well-timed nudge (a kick in the butt?) from a third party who wants the best for you.

Credit where it’s due: the concept comes from Nick Saban, a college football coach known for his standards and no-nonsense approach. Here’s how he puts it:

“We oftentimes talk about what someone’s potential is, but I think to put it in better terms… the Capability Gap is what you’re capable of relative to what you’re doing… if you understand the truth about that, you can actually take information that can help you close that gap.”

Letting a Grand Canyon-sized capability gap sit in your life — and your business — gives error a mile of runway. It’s a blind spot that can have disastrous consequences for your biggest decisions and strategies. Shrinking that gap takes courage and discipline, yes, but also realism and honesty. Spotting a gap takes real wisdom and, often, a well-timed nudge (a kick in the butt?) from a third party who wants the best for you.

Credit where it’s due: the concept comes from Nick Saban, a college football coach known for his standards and no-nonsense approach. Here’s how he puts it:
“We oftentimes talk about what someone’s potential is, but I think to put it in better terms… the Capability Gap is what you’re capable of relative to what you’re doing… if you understand the truth about that, you can actually take information that can help you close that gap.”

Tame your expectations before they own you

You’ll find me wildly original for saying it sounds better in English, right?

Manage your expectations, or they will manage you.

That’s the key to dodging a whole array of problems. Which is why I’m going to linger here a bit (brace yourself, it’s a little long).

Take inventory

If you stick around and read me regularly you’ll realize I’m like a little old lady with her quirks. Self-knowledge is one of my favorites. Half Yoda, half broken record, I answer my clients’ and friends’ existential spirals with exercises that almost always have the same goal: get to know yourself better.

For what we’re tackling today, it’s crucial to know your strengths, skills, and preferences so you can assess your capabilities precisely and fairly. Sounds elementary? How many basic tasks do we skip because we “already know” the outcome? Trust me: way too many. Situations change, and we keep convincing ourselves we no longer need to do certain basics, which leads us to commit mistakes that would have been very easy to avoid.

So, when you’re gauging your capability gap, take the time to really pin down your capabilities. And to avoid going off the rails and missing all objectivity, I strongly suggest you bribe a reliable person with good food (or any bribe suited to their tastes; if you’re talking to me, a nice meal will do), and ask them to be your guardrail. Let’s be honest: when it’s time to sing our own praises, the hymnals seem to have been on a strict diet for a while. That’s when your clear-eyed friend, and that delicious dinner, step in to ring the bell. Their job is to name the qualities and skills you actually have but forgot to mention, and to cross your t’s and dot your i’s… and we’ll stop there.

It matters to surround yourself with people who can do this with you: make sure you aren’t judging yourself too harshly, and that you’re fully aware of both your assets and your weaknesses. The ones who will point to what’s good and what’s not are the ones to keep close. Remember: it’s always easy to find people who’ll shower you with praise when you succeed. Building a circle of honest, forthright people who will tell you — no matter what — when you’re off the mark is trickier.

Be realistic

When it comes to expectations, lucidity is non-negotiable. Whether you’re taking stock of your capabilities or setting those expectations in the first place. Here’s a painful example from my daily organization. For almost two months I’ve been using a roadmap tied to my annual goals that helps me steer my business without losing sight of the strategy (thank you, Héloïse). It has me planning each week and spreading tasks across the days. It looks suspiciously like an old-school to-do list (believe me, it’s much better).

I realized — after a comment from my partner — that I never do everything planned for the day. Every evening, same story: I mope over the three tasks that fell into the day’s black hole. Until the fatal question landed: “Could it be you’re putting too much in a single day?” I remember feeling ashamed, exposed. It was so obvious I hadn’t even considered it. I’m a pro at loading my day like it lasts 72 hours. My denial of reality fed the belief “I’m not productive enough,” therefore “I’m useless,” therefore… I’ll let you fill in the rest.

I think the point is clear enough. When you’re setting expectations — for yourself or for others, professionally or not — keep your feet on the ground. Refer back to your capabilities inventory (and what your trusted people told you). Assess your stakeholders, as we say in project management: who’s involved, to what extent, what are their interests and expectations, and what risks and opportunities do they represent? Assess the environment you’re operating in. Is it stable or not? Again, what opportunities and risks does it present? The more realistic you are at this observation stage, the more precise you’ll be in understanding your capability gap.

When it comes to not getting carried away — or duped — by your expectations, I’m convinced that surgical precision and a detailed analysis of the situation, like a project manager overseeing the construction of an A380, are essential. Fun fact: in project management we create a “product breakdown structure” that dissects the product to its smallest part before starting. Trust me, it’s a dizzying document (I’ll show you with a bicycle, because if we use the airplane we’ll be here all week).

We then allocate work and resources to each part, and so on. I did my master’s on this, and we’re not touring the whole subject in a 10-minute read.

What matters: meticulous decomposition limits uncertainty, and therefore the unrealistic expectations that are the seeds of future disappointment.

Learn patience

To wrap up expectations and how to manage them, I have to put on my Storytime Cape and tell you a tale. Or better yet, let me quote Monsieur de La Fontaine:

There’s no point in sprinting; you have to set out at the right time.
The Hare and the Tortoise will attest to that.
(…) In the end, when he saw
the other nearly at the end of the course,
he shot out like an arrow; but the bursts he made
were in vain: the Tortoise arrived first.

“Well then,” she cried, “was I not right?
What use is your speed?
I win! And what would it be
if you had to carry a house?”

We all know the moral. It’s about slow, steady effort. About the wisdom of someone who knows their potential and acts accordingly. About the importance of staying humble. I won’t revisit discipline — you can read that here — but I want to insist on patience and why you should arm yourself with it when it comes to goals close to your heart. Sometimes our impatience fogs our vision and helps build the illusion that makes our expectations unreachable.

We live in a world where everything moves fast, instant gratification rules, and everything is engineered to stimulate our need for recognition. Everything is designed to show us what we lack so it can be sold back to us. That’s the economy:
• I sell you what I have and you don’t. Simple, basic.
• You sell me what I don’t have. Simple, basic.
Got the song stuck in your head? Thought so.

So patience is rare, and not that easy to cultivate, because everything conspires to make us believe we’ll be happier without it — to the point where even mindfulness, which is basically the antithesis of mass consumerism, has become a flagship product in the wellness market (almost as big as pharmaceuticals). Which means we’ll have to double down to cultivate a taste for waiting, for effort, and for that hard-won patience. Because today, despite the overly tidy “success stories” flooding social media, the reality behind the storytelling is that the businesses that succeed, that are profitable, and that don’t shut down are the ones that are strategic and refuse to quit. The ability to persist, to adapt, to face adversity probably accounts for more achievement than “lightning bolts of genius” or “miracle methods.” I’m not saying there aren’t extraordinary people with talents that outstrip the average. I’m saying the average business lifespan in France is three years, and it’s not just about macroeconomic context. From experience, I can assure you it runs much deeper than that instinct in us that pushes us not to throw in the towel.

I think that’s enough on keeping your expectations in their proper place. I’ll close this section by reminding you to celebrate your wins, and to actually track what’s happening so you can do that. Let’s see how to stop things from falling apart after this.

Time to deliver

Enter the Key Performance Indicators (aka KPIs)

I promise I didn’t plan this project-management detour. When I studied KPIs at school they weren’t social-media sexy, and we all agreed they didn’t belong in the “cool stuff” category. And yet here I am almost ten years later, about to sing their praises. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s necessary.

Once your expectations are clarified and adjusted, you need to be able to evaluate what you’re actually producing. It’s the only way to measure the size of your capability gap. To do that, you need performance indicators. You don’t have to keep some ultra-complex spreadsheet; you just need to choose how, at any given moment, you can measure your level of performance and therefore compare reality to expectations. The smaller the gap, the better. Yes, the goal is to shrink it as much as possible, in case that wasn’t obvious. And if you find your performance comes in below what you hoped for, for whatever reason — surprises, detours, bad forecasts — you can take steps to correct course without heading straight for the self-flagellation square (we’ll get to that).

I’m not going to unpack every possible indicator here. That’s for a future post.

The Archives

Archives are not meant to die in a forgotten folder on your computer. Read that again if you need to. Keeping a well-documented archive of your failures is the most useful resource you can build for your future. Let’s not just say “our failures made us succeed” — let’s actually use them.

In project management we love “logs,” little creatures that capture everything. Knowledge management is the art of how an organization treats information, how it captures it and uses it best (among other things). So we keep an error log, an “abandoned midway” log, and a bunch of others I won’t list here. We study them for future projects or when we move into a new iteration of the current one. I suggest you do the same to narrow your capability gap. Again, you don’t need a Rube Goldberg machine. Take the time, in the moment you notice the gap, to record it and analyze it.

Picture this: you go away for a weekend with friends. Some things are great, others grate. As soon as you get back, note the little irritants: did you need your own room? Maybe you don’t like sharing a bathroom. Was it an activity issue? Note how you felt and what could have made the situation play out differently. Be as realistic as possible, remember what we said earlier. If you do this regularly and seriously, it can make a real difference to how you strategically manage your projects (and your life). Take notes while you’re in it or not too long after, so you don’t fall prey to the cognitive biases that varnish our memories of rough patches (the brain is clever, but it does prefer the nicer memories). The goal isn’t to build mountains of information you’ll never use. Flip the process:

• Pick a project, personal or professional, where you’ve recently thought, “this isn’t moving like I want” (fine, you probably said it less gently, something like “I suck”).
• Recall your goal and check whether your expectations are realistic. Ask for help if you feel yourself wobbling.
• Compare what you’re producing now with what you should be producing. As you do, note what’s missing — in concrete terms of output, what you haven’t produced yet.
• List the steps needed to produce what’s missing.
• For each step, what did you lack? Is it easy to fix? How?
• If you’re stuck on the how, check your archives. Maybe there’s a similar situation in there you can learn from. If you don’t have anything, go look at someone else’s archives. It’s always nicer to learn from mistakes we didn’t make.

Now you’ve got the beginnings of a plan to bridge the gap and get to that coveted goal of a narrow capability gap. Shrinking the gap will lift your success rate and your self-esteem, which drops you straight into a virtuous cycle. Worth the effort, no?

Compassion as a tool for resilience

I’ll end by insisting — as promised — on the need not just for lucidity but for kindness. We live in a time where performance is equated with worth, thanks to some very convenient shortcuts. So it’s fundamental to work on your self-esteem because, take it from my not-so-young experience, no one’s going to do it for you. I want to point you to a questionnaire that helps you assess your level of self-compassion. It was developed by Kristin Neff, who collaborates with Brené Brown (whom I admire unreasonably). She also wrote a book with the same title, which I highly recommend.

I won’t dwell on the questionnaire — please just take the time to do it. It lets you take an honest look at the degree to which we can sometimes be violent with ourselves. The idea isn’t to pile on more guilt, but to see the whole picture with fresh, fair eyes. Because I don’t think we can evaluate our performance and capabilities correctly if we’re incapable of compassion toward ourselves.

The questionnaire

To be clear, I’m not saying every shortfall should be justified by “being kind to yourself.” Far from it. I refuse to let compassion become an open door to complacency and mediocrity. It’s not about dramatically lowering the bar. It is about understanding that keeping the bar unrealistically high is the best way to stay in constant failure. Recognizing self-sabotage patterns is key to countering them. This one is one of my favorites: I always set huge goals, always give myself a clearly unreachable target (at least within the time frame or resources I have), then I prove to myself with impeccable logic that I’m an epic failure who, as expected, missed the mark. How to counter that? Surround yourself with people who pound it into your head when you plan to bicycle to the moon and your BFF isn’t E.T. Also, use the guardrails we talked about: archives, checks, serious analysis, KPIs.

Compassion, used well, is a powerful tool. It can fuel the resilience you need to keep going and join the happy few who succeed. Mix it with a solid dose of common sense and two tablespoons of patience for best results. I’ll give the last word to the late Charlie Munger:

“It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”