It's up to you. :) If you're getting what you want out of life, or if your predictions are usually accurate, in spite of having a mental model that isn't technically correct, then that would mean having results that didn't come from excessive rumination or memorizing lots of units of specific information. Similarly, religion can lead a person to perform actions in a way that are of benefit even if the beliefs instilled upon them are factual nonsense. What I'm saying is that a person can do just that but with high level conceptual structures as opposed to either religion or pedantic data hoarding.
When you keep trying to do right, but your world is perpetually on fire, you probably aren't getting good results.
Interestingly, this can be seen as an extension of the same principle; in a given person's life, there are impossibly many events going on all the time, each of which is providing some benefit, or negative result, and you could if you choose, try to look for specific memories of achievements or failures in order to benchmark your life's progress, falling back onto them and recalling these specific moments.
The obvious problem with such events is that they may not be representative, and so like a gambler remembering the last few wins, you could keep trying to solve a problem.
Conversely, you could try to remember conclusions, and a few simple procedures, while also passively using a diary or data entry system, such that you have a general feel of "how things have been going lately", without any specific examples, and then occasionally rerun your procedure, taking stock of recent events from recorded data, and update your abstract value.
Then there's the hybrid approach; working on a dataset, find a few specific data points that most properly represent the diversity of your current experience, then remember those, the general feeling associated with them, and your procedure for updating them.
That way you use your emotional episodic memory, but tie it to things that are verified by more careful reflective analysis.
Without specific memories, how can you tell whether or not you have been getting results? :)