How Do You Measure the Impact of Performance?
My Day1’s. Attendee’s at the INBETWEEN Framework soft launch in West Hollywood, CA.
I’ve been thinking a lot about effort and performance lately, not just how well we perform, but how we decide whether the performance mattered.
I know how to build something that performs well on paper. I've done it for high school athletics, Student Affairs divisions, and experientially for big brands most of my career. What I've always known, even when the industry around me didn't, is that a room can hit every number on the recap and still not have moved a single person who was in it. It’s why I’m building something where the strongest outcomes aren’t always the ones quantifiable on paper.
A person leaves a class standing differently in their body than they walked in. Someone finally does the thing they’d spent years convincing themselves they couldn’t. A student tells you months later that one sentence rearranged how they see themselves. None of that has a column to live in, although realer than most metrics.
A number is merely a proxy for something real. It was never the real thing.
Right now I’m building a brand partnership deck that asks me to promise impressions, a real number attached to a real projection, because that’s the language brands need to say yes. I’ll hit it. But the number was never why I built the room. It’s the translation, not the truth. The skill was never choosing between the numbers and the truth. The skill is holding both without letting the number quietly become the truth.
I’ve always been drawn to the details others skip: the creative expression, the freedom, the courage, the depth, the balance. Not because excellence is doing something well. Because there’s a different category entirely for doing something with intention nobody asked you to bring.
I’ve had to remind myself of that lately.
There’s a specific frustration in knowing the quality of your work and still watching the recognition lag behind it. The instinct is to respond by doing more. Proving more. Explaining more. Performing at a level so undeniable that someone finally sees what you already know.
I’m less interested in that now.
Stop searching for validation in your pursuit of excellence.
That doesn’t mean recognition doesn’t matter. Respect matters. Fair compensation matters. Being valued appropriately matters. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. But there’s a dangerous line between wanting to be recognized and needing recognition to confirm the work already has value. One is healthy ambition. The other quietly hands your worth to whoever happens to be watching that day.
I don’t want to spend the next chapter auditioning for people who’ve already had enough evidence.
Excellence was never supposed to need a defense. The moment I'm explaining why my work is good, I've already lost the thread of why I started doing it in the first place. Maybe the real measure of performance isn’t what happened because I showed up. Maybe it’s what became possible because I did.
That’s a different unit of measurement. One that doesn’t make my excellence dependent on someone else’s ability to see it.
Growth, in an INBETWEEN season, isn’t becoming less ambitious. It’s becoming more discerning about where the ambition actually deserves to go.
Questions I’m Sitting With This Week
If I stopped explaining my work, would it still stand on its own?
What became possible because I showed up, that I haven’t given myself credit for?
What’s one thing I did this month that made something possible for someone else?