Metrics Matter: How I Measure my Success With Loving Curiosity

I'm gonna start with the caveat that there should be a "try" somewhere in that title! I try really hard to do what I'm about to talk about, but I'm also going to be real. As your favorite recovering chronic perfectionist, hyper-independent, workaholic Montessori boy, I struggle on the daily with what I'm going to describe below. I'm writing this because this morning, I just experienced a win in this department. I'm a firm believer that sharing narratives of success rooted in self-love holds the power to amplify and expand those narratives ten-fold!

Fridays are my day for writing over at my substack, Rewilding Montessori. I am grateful to have the space in my week to devote to writing. But in true Gen-Z influencer fashion, it's in my generational programing to get caught up in analyzing likes, comments, and other social media metrics that are explicitly linked to the anxiety epidemic of people my age. With substack, there's a new metric I've not had as much exposure to; subscriber opening percentages.

Since substack is a subscription platform, every article I post can go straight to your inbox if you subscribe (I hope you do ??!)

This morning, I thought I'd mosey on over to look at them; big mistake (or so I thought!).

I was faced with this picture:

Enter, Insecurity, Stage Right:

While you, dear, sane reader, probably see my views have gone up a great deal, my eyes went to one place: open percentages.

I immediately started to ask: "People are getting sick of my emails already? Am I writing too often? What's WRONG with me?"

I hate how self-worth programing in my mind is tied to metrics of any kind like this, because I know that if it were a student of mine expressing these feelings, I'd be quick to assuage, comfort, and help to reframe their worth away from success metrics on a screen. But, as always, it's easier to care for a child around me rather than the child within me.

But thankfully, through the inner child work and anxiety management practices I try to implement, I was able to pause and do one of my favorite things: embody curiosity.

It's a phrase I use to really get me out of the judgement zone and into the learning zone. I tell myself to literally BE Curiosity! Pretend to be Curiosity; what would you do, what would you ask?

And it made me look at those pesky percentages and formulate an analysis plan:

1. Look at the number of subscribers on the day the article was posted.
2. multiply that number by the percentage to find out how many actual humans opened it.
3. Look at the data.

Within a minute and a few calculator app opens later, there was a totally different story, and Curiosity gave me the full breakdown. Because my subscriber pool had expanded, the amount of people that made up a percentage point increased. My community membership had expanded a lot, and my readership numbers had also expanded; it just didn't keep up the same ratio of growth as my subscriber numbers. So while there was a "lower opening percentage," the reality had been that every week, more people read it than the previous week.

Oh.

I looked back at the raw data again (pictured above).

"That makes sense, I didn't even notice the view count; it gets higher every article!"

"Mhmm," says Curiosity back to me, clicking her pen closed and straightening her files. "Next time, ask me first before you assume you're failing, please?"

"Okay, I'll try..." my wounded child agrees.

Why am I like this, though? Why are WE like this? In the face of success, growth, and positive expansion, it's this temptation to find the one thing going wrong with everything that's going right and pop our own balloon! I'm sure my therapist has many answers to that "Why?" -- we won't go there!

The Moral of the Story:

The metrics we use to measure our success are not all created equal! I often decry the inaccuracy of percentages, and how small data sets make those numbers amplified. But we loooove percentages in our culture, and even I fall prey to their ability to steal power, confidence, and security in ones purpose despite my lack of faith in them.

The antidote: taking a 10,000 feet high perspective, looking at all the data, and deciding on another metric to get a different narrative. On paper, that meant the difference between a story of decreasing impact (failure) and a story of expanding impact (success). I'm so glad I was able to realize that, by the data, the story of Rewilding Montessori's first month has been an amazing one, because I know by the inner metrics of my spirit that I am succeeded and doing work that I'm proud of, regardless of whether the data backs me up (it's nice that it did in this case, though!)

I believe that data analysis can be motivated out of love, and that embodying curiosity with data is an act of love! As my friend, Susan Zoll, Ph.D. says:

"Data tells a story."

I hope we can all have the courage to embrace radical self-love by looking at all the "data" of who we are. I wonder what wonderful stories are waiting to be told for us all!