The three success metrics most leaders track. The one that actually matters.
Revenue, headcount, and promotions feel like the markers of a successful career. A quote from Tim Tebow at a conference broke that math for me. Here is what I measure now.
For most of my career I tracked three numbers: results, promotions, and pay. Sixteen years in the Army, then business, chasing the next rank, the next win, the next few bucks. By every scoreboard I knew about, it was working.
Then I sat in a conference audience on one of the worst stretches of my life. I had left the military earlier than I planned. I had collected 383 job rejections in a row, and I know the number is exactly 383 because I saved every single rejection email. The speaker that day was Tim Tebow. He looked out at the crowd, and I would swear he looked right at me, and said: the greatest tragedy in one’s life is to be successful at things that don’t matter.
That sentence broke my scoreboard.
Success and significance are different columns
Here is how I sort it now, and I say this from a stage regularly because I need to hear it as much as anyone.
Success focuses on what you have. Significance focuses on who you impact.
Success is measured by results, numbers, and wins. Significance is measured by lives changed.
Success is visible and rewarded. Significance is usually unseen and unrecognized.
Success asks: how far did I go? Significance asks: who did I bring with me?
Nothing on the left column is bad. I run a restaurant with about a hundred people on the team. If I am not successful, if the numbers do not work, none of them have jobs. You cannot skip the left column. But the left column is a lagging indicator of a career. The right column is the leading indicator of a life.
The test I cannot escape
At the end of it all, success asks: what did you achieve? Significance asks: who is better because you lived?
I gave the eulogy at my dad’s funeral. Try summing up a person’s life in fifteen minutes. I promise you the room does not want the revenue numbers. Nobody stands up at a funeral and reads the org chart. They tell you who the person showed up for.
There is a picture of my life I keep in my keynote: about four thousand boxes on a screen, one for every week of an average lifespan. Mine are mostly colored in already. My dad died of a heart condition I am predisposed to. My mom died young of cancer. When I subtract the years they did not get, the white boxes left on my grid are not many. That is not morbid to me. That is a wake-up call with a timestamp. Psalm 90 asks God to teach us to number our days so we may gain a heart of wisdom. The boxes are how I number mine.
What I actually measure now
One question, most days: who did I make feel significant today?
Some days the answer is a team member who got a handwritten note in her first language. Some days it is a text I sent to an old sergeant major in Texas who shaped my life twenty years ago and still gets a thank-you for it. Some days the honest answer is nobody, because I ran the whole day on autopilot, busy instead of present. The measurement is not for a dashboard. It is so the honest answer stings while there is still time to fix it.
If you want a place to start, steal the questions I use. They are numbered and free at jonharmeling.com/prompts. And if you want the short version, it fits in one line: success is what you achieve. Significance is who is better because you lived.
Track the second one.