Last week I stared at my ad dashboard, celebrating the spike in clicks and messages.
For about 5 minutes.
Then I did the math with all the work and costs and realized that it wouldn't work as a business model I can sustain.
That was my reminder of a frustrating but freeing fact:
what’s measurable and easily managed isn’t always what matters.
We love metrics we can see.
Steps. Calories. Clicks. Views. Comments.
Numbers make us feel in control, make us feel like we are making progress. But is this the progress you need?
Often, the thing that truly moves your life or business forward is the thing you can’t easily and directly track. So you need to figure out how to link what you can measure, manage and work on to what matters.
Take health.
I once had a client who tracked everything - steps, macros, workouts.
Her spreadsheets were better than mine.
But she was still exhausted, overwhelmed, not doing better in the things that mattered most - wellbeing.
The problem wasn’t not enough steps.
It was an unmanaged stress load.
And that isn't as easily tracked with your smartwatch or spreadsheets.
Same pattern in my advertising experiments.
Instagram tells you everything it can count: clicks, views, messages.
But it can’t tell you whether those clicks lead to the clients you want or the work that actually builds the future you want.
That part is harder to measure.
But it’s the part that matters.
So instead of scaling what looked good numerically, I had to pause and redesign the entire flow, from ad to conversation to client, so it reflects the impact I want to create, not just the vanity metrics the platform hands me.
I don’t need more clicks.
I need the right kind of clients.
And you don’t need more data.
You need the right signals that move you toward the life or work you actually want.
So over to you, dear reader:
Are you measuring what truly drives the outcome you want, or just what’s easy to count?
