‘It Was Good’: Borrowing God’s Own Method of Self-Evaluation This New Year

A small detail in the creation story is easy to read right past. After each stage of creation, the text pauses. God looks at what was just made and evaluates it. “It was good.” On the third day, the work is checked twice. By the sixth day, after humanity enters the picture, the verdict is upgraded: “It was very good.”

I’ve always found that pause as fascinating as the creating itself. Creation, in this telling, isn’t one long unbroken act followed by a victory lap. It’s a series of stages, each one stopped, looked at honestly, and only then built upon. Even in the biblical imagination, making something worthwhile seems to require regularly putting down the tools and asking, “How is this actually going?”

That question lands a little differently as we move into Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. On the Days of Awe we are asked to do something remarkably similar: Stop, look honestly at the year we’ve just lived, and evaluate it. Not to punish ourselves, but to move into the next year with our eyes open. This same instinct—structured, honest self-evaluation—is also one of the most useful tools I have used in career coaching. It’s called a personal SWOT analysis, and once you’ve seen it, you start noticing how naturally it fits this time of year.

A Business Tool That Happens to Suit the Season

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Companies use it to plan strategically, but it works just as well when pointed at a single life. The idea is simple: Strengths and weaknesses live inside you—these are your traits, habits, and skills. Opportunities and threats live outside you, in the environment you operate in.

Strengths are the things you do well, often without noticing: You make friends easily, you keep your cool when others don’t, you can explain complicated things in simple terms. If people keep telling you the same thing about yourself, that’s not flattery. That’s important data, and it’s worth believing.

Weaknesses are the patterns that quietly get in your way, such as putting things off, going along when you should speak up, or avoiding a skill gap you’ve known about for years. Naming a weakness out loud isn’t an act of self-criticism. It’s usually the first real step toward doing something about it.

Opportunities are the favorable winds around you—a mentor who is willing to teach you something, a promising shift in your industry, a course finally opening up, a colleague’s retirement that might reshape your role.

Threats are the troublesome headwinds—budget cuts on the horizon, a team that drains more than it gives, stiff competition for the role you want, or a new manager you haven’t yet quite figured out how to work with.

This framework forces you to separate what you can control from what you can’t and then make a plan that accounts for both.

Even God’s Creation Reads Like a SWOT Grid

Read the opening chapters of Genesis with this lens, and it holds together in a surprising way. The light, declared good, is a strength, fully realized, along with the other days’ creations. However, humanity’s trouble holding to even a single boundary, starting with the very first people in the very first garden, reads like a weakness—a disappointing pattern the Torah keeps circling back to. Humanity’s pull toward self-destruction becomes severe enough that God eventually regrets having created us at all. Humanity’s destructive behavior is easily seen as a threat to its survival. And then, fortunately, Noah appears—someone worth building around, an opportunity in the middle of the wreckage. Then, recognizing the threat at the Tower of Babel, God, likely having learned from his Great Flood experience, adopted a different approach to resolve it. As an aside, many of us may have been alerted recently to the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potentially devastating threats of AI. In this post, we focus on what we, as individuals, can do about ourselves.

Thus, even in the first few chapters of Genesis, we see that building something worthwhile and evaluating it honestly are treated as the same act. You do not just build and hope. You build, you stop, you look at what is actually true, and then you keep going with that information in hand.

Why Now Is the Moment to Actually Do This

A personal SWOT analysis is only useful if it ends in a plan. Once you have filled in the four boxes honestly, the real question starts: What are you going to do about what you just wrote down? Can a weakness be reframed as a strength in a different setting? Is there something small you can do this month to take advantage of an opportunity before it closes? Is there a threat worth preparing for now, rather than reacting to later, once it’s already a crisis?

A few things tend to make the process actually work, rather than just feel good for a moment.

It is most helpful to do it with someone else—a SWOT buddy or SWOT havruta. Left alone, most of us are terrible at seeing ourselves clearly—not out of denial, but because we’re busy living our lives, and honest self-assessment keeps getting pushed to next week. A colleague, a friend, or a spouse can ask the questions you may not think to ask yourself. When did you last use that strength, and how did people respond? Could that weakness actually be a strength you’re using in the wrong place? Can you work on that weakness? Is the competition for that promotion really as fierce as it feels from the inside? And I’ve often heard this comment in career coaching with couples: “Why isn’t your sense of humor on this list? Everyone who knows you would put it there.”

Do it more than once. The job market moves. You pick up skills. People come and go from your team. A SWOT analysis from two years ago is describing a version of your life that may not exist anymore. That’s exactly why an annual rhythm, one that’s already built into the calendar for so many of us this time of year, is worth taking seriously. You’re not starting from a blank page each time. You are updating something that’s already alive.

And don’t limit it to your résumé. The same four boxes can be the tool to help you consider your relationships, your health, your role in your community, or your spiritual life. What strength have you underused this year without quite noticing? What weakness has shaped more decisions than you’d like to admit? What opportunity—a class, a friendship, a relationship worth repairing—is sitting right in front of you? What threat will still be sitting there next Rosh HaShana if you don’t name it today?

Where to Actually Start

Here’s the simplest version I give clients: Sit down sometime in the next week and sketch a four-box grid for career issues, personal issues, or both, whichever feels more urgent right now. Don’t polish it. Just write. Then hand it to one person, such as a friend, a colleague, or a partner, and ask them to go through it with you, and offer to do the same for them.

That is really what this whole season is asking of us. Not guilt, not a spiral of self-criticism, just an honest look and a clearer plan for what comes next. Creation itself, as the Torah tells it, didn’t happen in one unexamined push, or even a Big Bang. It happened in cycles: Build, then pause, then look, then build again. Our own growth, professional and personal, tends to work the same way.

Shana tova u’metuka—may it be a good and sweet year, thoughtfully built.