Nothing frustrates the brain more than effort with no ROI.
Here’s the peculiar part: often, the return is there. You just never looked for it.
Someone on the mountain today asked me how hard it is to sell human development to companies.
“Quite a battle.”
Because most people development isn’t designed to measure the ROI that companies care about. So leadership spends the budget because there’s budget to spend. They sit through the training. They nod. Six months later, nobody remembers what changed.
Because nobody tracked the right thing.
Was the ROI there? Productivity. Retention. Performance. The bottom line that moved?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.
But if you don’t measure it, you’ll never know either way. And not knowing makes the next time so much harder to “buy”. And everyone loses.
When you believe your effort was a waste, even when it wasn’t, your motivation to try something similar will go waaaaaaay down. And the next time someone offers you a program, a coach, a protocol — you’re a hard sell. Good luck changing your mind!
This is why, before we do anything else, I get obsessively clear with every coaching client on what they actually care about. What does better look like? What does winning look like? In your work, your health, your life?
Name it, picture it, describe it before we begin.
Because if we don’t name it, we won’t design for it. If we don’t design for it, we won’t measure it. And if we don’t measure it — we can do real work together, meaningful work, work that changes something — and you’ll still walk away thinking: what was even the point?
The measurement also makes the tools’ choice more precise.
You want to lose weight? Track the calories. Not as punishment. As information you need to adjust the most important lever for the progress YOU want. Without the number, you’re guessing. You might get stronger, sleep better, feel lighter in your body — and still feel like you failed, because the thing you said you cared about didn’t move. So next time someone offers you a path, you shake your head. Already tried that - didn’t work.
But could it?
Before every sales cycle, every business development push, every new health protocol I consider — I ask myself 2 questions,
Why am I doing this?
Am I measuring the right thing to know if it’s working?
So I don’t end up working hard and feeling like it all was a waste.
Over to you, dear reader,
What are you working on right now that you’ve never actually defined success for? And what do you need to start measuring to feel like your efforts aren’t a waste?