But For What Exactly?
Welcome to issue #39 of The Davem Dish. Every week I share what actually works in investing based on my 20 years of wins, losses and expensive lessons. You’ll also get my thoughts on solopreneurship and life in general because the same principles apply — keep it simple, stay consistent and focus on what matters.
My first professional job was working in sales for a freight company, and the job description was about as simple as it gets — find small businesses and get them to use our shipping services. There wasn’t a lot of training. We were handed a territory and told to knock on doors and set up appointments. Cold calling.
And I get it, cold calling is the fastest way to learn. Get told “no” a 1,000 times and you learn a lot about everything. At the time, though, I wondered why there wasn’t a more efficient system. Knocking on doors without doing a minute of research ahead of time meant you had no idea whose door you were actually knocking on, which led to some embarrassing situations.
One time I remember introducing myself at a solar panel company and the owner asked, “What happened to Jaime?”
Nothing had happened to Jaime. He was a senior rep who, it turns out, was actively trying to win more business from this same company. I mumbled something about how we work together and got out of there as quickly as possible. Jaime was understandably unhappy when he found out. It made us both look stupid, and he was trying to make his numbers.
Around that same time, I learned about the scorecard, which every sales organization has under one name or another. Ours was a running tally of where each rep stood against their targets, sent by email. This is a performance tool, of course — get the competition going, publicly shame the low performers, and push everyone to close more sales.
I had made some sales by then, but my scorecard had a big zero next to my name. I asked my manager why and she explained that you have to assign yourself to the accounts to get credit.
It would have been nice to know that on Day 1. But now it dawned on me how to avoid another Jaime incident. Before visiting any potential accounts, I spent a few minutes looking up whether they already had representation. Then I called on the ones that didn’t and attached my name to those accounts so I’d get credit for whatever services they ended up using.
Simple strategy, and it worked. In a sense, I gamed the system. I showed enough sales that management left me alone, which meant I could do less cold calling and spend more time with the handful of customers who had interesting problems I actually wanted to work on. There weren’t commissions at my level, so there wasn’t much incentive to outperform unless you were angling for a promotion. I wasn’t. I didn’t really enjoy the job and wanted to move on.
Funny thing was, at the end of the year I was the highest performer in a group of ten. I received an award and recognition at a big sales meeting. I laughed about it for a while, and then I quit a short time later.
What took me time to appreciate was that the scorecard never directly measured whether a customer’s shipping problem got solved. It measured volume. Who did more than last month and last year. That’s what a scorecard does. It takes whatever the job is and converts it into a quantity, where the only question to ask is how much.
Lately I’ve been paying attention to the “more” trend. Everyone wants more. More followers, more subscribers, more revenue, more possessions.
But for what exactly?
The Test
Take whatever number you’ve been watching this week and run it through a test.
You have 25,000 followers and you want 26,000. Walk it forward. What specifically changes in your life on the day that counter ticks over? Does the work get better? Does the message land differently? Or do you get a slightly bigger number and permission to feel good about yourself until dinner?
Run the same test with money. You’re sitting on a $1.3 million portfolio balance and want $1.5 million. What does that extra $200,000 buy you today? Same house, same work schedule. The number moved, but it probably didn’t have much impact on your life.
The research here is mixed. The famous Kahneman and Deaton study from 2010 found that day-to-day emotional well-being stopped improving above roughly $75,000 of household income. That finding got repeated everywhere for a decade as proof that money stops mattering. Then Matthew Killingsworth ran a much larger study in 2021 using real-time experience sampling and found no plateau at all. Well-being kept climbing well past $75,000. The two researchers eventually teamed up with Barbara Mellers in 2023 to reconcile the conflict, and what they found was that for most people happiness does keep rising with income, and among the happiest group the effect accelerated. The flattening Kahneman found applies to the least happy portion of the population, where money relieves the misery that a lack of money causes, but that’s about it.
Worth noting they were measuring income, though. Money for daily living isn’t the same as a portfolio balance or follower count.
Keeping Up
Jaime and I were never on the same board, by the way. He was a senior rep with assigned accounts, ranked against the other senior reps. The junior reps were ranked against each other on finding new small business accounts. Different jobs and rankings.
In the late 90s, two researchers asked a sample of faculty, students and staff at Harvard to choose between two worlds. In the first, you earn $50,000 a year and everyone around you earns $25,000. In the second, you earn $100,000 and everyone around you earns $200,000. They spelled out that prices were identical in both worlds, so option two makes you objectively twice as rich. About half of respondents picked the first one.
People chose to be poorer as long as they were ahead.
I think about this when I watch investors compare portfolios, or business owners compare subscriber counts. Two different problems treated the same. One is accumulation — you need more than you had. The other is comparison — you need more than they have, and the target moves every time somebody in your feed posts a milestone. The cruel part of the second one is that your own progress becomes irrelevant. You can have the best year of your life and finish it miserable because somebody you’ve never met had a better one.
Gaming The Board and What Matters
The other thing that happens when a number becomes the goal is that people start manufacturing it.
I found the loophole with the sales scorecard, and I wasn’t especially clever about it. The same thing happens everywhere, at a larger scale, with much better tools. Bought followers. Cherry-picked screenshots of winning trades with the losers cropped out. Revenue numbers quoted gross, before ad spend, before refunds, before the fact that most of it came from one client who left in March.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to sit here and tell you numbers or growth doesn’t matter. That’s advice people give after they already have theirs.
Numbers matter, right up until they don’t, and the question is where that line sits for you. The difference between $50,000 and $100,000 of income is a different life with different options. The difference between 100 subscribers and 1,000 is substantial. More reach means the work reaches people it was built for.
Somewhere above that line, though, the number stops changing anything you really care about and the chase keeps running at full speed anyway. That’s worth noticing. On one side, growth is an instrument — you want the subscribers so you can provide for your family, live comfortably, sell something you believe in, help somebody avoid the mistakes you made. On the other side, growth is the trophy that feeds your ego.
If hitting the number is the best part of your week, you have your answer about what you’re chasing. The question is; is that truly fulfilling?
What Would You Build?
We all use scoreboards because they’re easy to count. It’s simple to count followers, and the same goes for revenue, square footage and steps walked. The metric isn’t always a judgment about what matters, but rather about what’s easy to tally, and somewhere along the way we all agreed to treat those as the same thing.
If you got to build the board yourself, what would you actually put on it? It’s possible that the real answers don’t fit in a column and are hard to count, which is why they never make it onto anyone’s dashboard. The conversation with a customer that changed how they ran their business. The reader who writes in to say they finally understood what they were paying an advisor for. The unproductive afternoon that turned out to be the best part of the week. Whether your friends want to spend time with you. None of that is easily quantified, and no growth guru has ever built a course around it.
So here’s the assignment this week. Name your number and then name what it buys — not what it proves, not where it ranks you, not what it says about you at the high school reunion. What it actually buys, in your real life, on an ordinary Wednesday.
“More” is the answer you give when you haven’t decided what you’re measuring. It’s the default, but not necessarily what will serve you in the long run.
I finished first out of ten and felt nothing, because I’d won a game I never cared about. Worth picking your own before somebody hands you theirs.
Cheers,
Andrew
What number are you focused on right now, and why? Let me know in the comments!
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The content provided are personal opinions and presented for educational purposes only, as of the date published or indicated. Davem Advisors LLC is not a bank, licensed securities dealer, broker or investment advisor. Displayed returns are unaudited. Nothing stated constitutes a recommendation or advice as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. You alone are solely responsible for determining whether any investment, strategy or service is appropriate for your objectives. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the risk of loss.