Impressive and Meaningful Are Different Measurements

Two reunions in two weekends. I went in braced to measure up against everyone there. I came out measuring something else.

My 15th at Harvard, my 10th at Harvard Business School. Record turnout or close to it at both.

Some of it was the catching up you'd expect. What you're working on, where you're living, how big the kids are now.

The conversations I remember went further than that. Some with the people I'm closest to, at a late table at Felipe's, the place we used to close down. Some with classmates I see every few years, in from the other side of the world.

And plenty of it wasn't deep at all. Just people I was glad to see, part of the same few years of my life. Whether they changed my life or not, they were there. That counted too.

A few classmates didn't come, and the reason I heard more than once was that they didn't feel they had anything impressive to report. I understood it. Schools like ours teach you to measure your life by scale and visibility, and they teach it well.

I'm not knocking that gauge. I chase it every week, and I want the founders I back to chase it too. Ambition isn't the problem.

The problem is when it's the only gauge you own. Impressive and meaningful are different measurements, and you can run up the score on one while the other quietly empties out.

More than a decade out, the people I admire most have the careers, and the life those careers were supposed to make room for.