Whose Measuring Stick?

I come from the business of big.

Larger-than-life is the family trade. My grandfather, my father, my sisters, and me, three generations of building things designed to make an entire arena gasp at the same moment. When your whole objective is spectacle, "impressive" stops being an achievement and becomes a baseline, the floor actually, and a strange thing happens when your floor is that high. You lose the ability to feel anything that isn't enormous.

So I'll ask the question I've been carrying around, because I suspect I'm not the only one holding it. When is it big enough? When have you produced enough, earned enough, built enough, become enough?  Who exactly decided where that line sits?

The world has an answer, and it's loud: output, revenue, rewards, reach. The scoreboard is external, it's public, and it's very good at making itself feel like the only one that matters. I've done well by that scoreboard. I'm not here to tell you it's fake or that ambition is a trap. I like the scoreboard, I built a career on it. However, there's a second scoreboard, and it keeps a quieter tally, and I've come to believe it's the more honest read.

Earlier this year my daughter was coming apart over a history test. Not the material but more the weight of it, the story she'd told herself is that she didn't know it. I made a cup of tea and sat on the floor with her while she recited dates, causes, and treaties back to me, and I stayed up much too late, and somewhere in there the panic drained out of her voice. When she thanked me the next morning, it wasn't for teaching her history, it was for reminding her she already knew it. Nobody measured that. No metric on earth captured it and it mattered more than most things I did that week that were measured.

It happens in my consulting work too. An executive has internalized some story about themselves, and I keep offering reframes that don't land, don't land, don't land, and then one does, and I watch the lightbulb actually click behind their eyes. There's no line item for that moment. It doesn't show up in a quarterly anything. It's just two people talking and a belief quietly reorganizing itself. (That's the work I do through Off Book, in the interest of full disclosure.)

It happens when someone in a rough patch asks to go for a walk, and talks without pausing for an hour while I mostly listen, and then arrives back at the door visibly lighter than they left it. I didn't produce anything, there was no spectacle, and it's some of the most important work I do, I don’t even think I can call it work. None of those moments would survive a metrics review, yet all of them are the point.

I think the tug of war isn't between ambition and contentment, it's between two measurement systems that don't speak the same language, and we've been trained to only hear the loud one. The trained ear detects the arena. It goes deaf to the kitchen table. The challenge isn't to stop caring about the big scoreboard. It's to recalibrate the instrument so you can actually feel the quiet one when it registers, because it's registering all the time and you're missing it.

My kids offer the clearest evidence I have. They do not care how many honors I collect or how many people gasped at the last show I produced or what the business is worth. They have never once asked. What they track, with an accuracy no external system could match, is whether I show up, whether I connect, whether I'm building their own sense of worth from the inside. That's their scoreboard and when I'm honest with myself, it's the one I most want to win.

So maybe "enough" was never a number to hit. Maybe it's a question of which instrument you're using to measure. The external one will never say enough, that's its design, it's built to keep moving the line. The internal one already has the answer, if you can quiet down long enough to read it.

A few things I'm trying, offered in case they're useful to you:

When I catch myself asking whether something was big enough, I try to follow it with a second question about who owns the standard I'm reaching for. Naming that person or construct, or realizing I can't, tends to loosen its grip.

I've started counting the unmeasured moments on purpose. The tea, the walk, the lightbulb, the follow-up email. Not to quantify them, that would miss the point, but to notice they happened, because the loud scoreboard erases them by default.

And I'm testing my sense of "enough" against the people whose opinion I'd actually trust with my life. It turns out they were never using the stick I was so afraid of failing.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole