Never Enough
You hit the target you set in January. There was a moment of relief, maybe a weekend of it. Then it became the floor, and you started again.
That cycle isn't vanity. The visible measures in your job fund real things: the mortgage, the holidays, the school fees. Tracking them is a rational response to a world that scores you on them.
The trap is letting the visible number become the only thing that sets your measure of enough, because that reference point resets every time you get close.
Some of the strongest analysts I worked with left during their worst performance stretches, when the numbers were against them and the pressure had nowhere to go. The firm measured everything that could be counted: output, ratings, hit rate. It had nothing for the stretch where good work meets a bad market and the scoreboard only records the outcome.
I survived one of those stretches because of one person. Not my manager. Instead, it was a seasoned investor who decided, for no reason the org chart required, to help me carry the weight. The work was hard either way. I just didn't have to hold it alone.
That gap stayed with me. What a firm can count is real, but it is not what determines who survives a bad year.
Years later, as a manager, I found myself on the other side of it. Wins I helped build were attributed elsewhere, while losses found their way back to me, and the truth sat somewhere in the middle where nothing was recorded. What kept me going was finding the work itself meaningful, because meaning doesn't depend on credit. That was my fixed point, and it held even when the conditions were arranged to make the contribution invisible.
A fixed internal measure is the only kind that holds. Mine was the meaning of the work; yours will be something else. The point is that it sits where the market cannot reach in and move it.
The most dangerous trap in a high-performing career is not failing. It is performing, for years, in service of a number that was handed to you.
This is the last letter in a series that opened with one question: am I running toward something, or running away from something? Mine resolved when I left investing for coaching, which is helping people find a measure of their own before the scoreboard sets one for them. That is my version, though. Most of the people I watched settle this never changed seats. They changed what they measured by and stayed exactly where they were.
The fuller version, and the whole series, is on my Substack, The ROE Letter.
https://substack.com/@charmianlong
What would meaningful work look like for you on a day nobody is watching?