The Wrong Currency

What do you do? That’s the first question people ask when they meet someone. Who you really are, what moves you at the moment, that comes later or never. Your answer to the first question defines your worth, it decides whether the conversation continues.

I answered this question for thirty years, with titles, positions, successes, roles and who knows what else. The answers were always great, because I made them sound good and because they simply worked. I delivered and was praised. I delivered more and was even admired. The mechanism was really that simple: you deliver and you get recognition right back. What you only realise later: at some point you need the recognition to still take yourself seriously inside your own working answers.

At some point the mechanism stopped working. Not because the performance dropped, but because the reward sank, no matter how much I delivered. It was never enough, not because the results were missing, but because the bar kept rising. With age and with career jumps, contentment is punished immediately. Because the performance principle has one hard quality: it wears you down. Not only the body and the nervous system, but also the belief that it’s worth carrying on like this.

Then come moments that feel like failure. Moments in which you realise that the whole equation of performance equals worth equals right to exist doesn’t add up. Not because you fail, but because at some point you start counting in a different currency. Usually it’s values. But values aren’t performance. Worth through performance is fine. But values instead of performance doesn’t work socially.

So the performance society knows only one answer to the question of what a person is worth: what they produce and what they achieve with it. Output, measurable and comparable, for example by the car key. If you don’t produce more and don’t achieve more than you achieved before, you’re no longer worth anything either. The whole thing concentrates into the question: “What do you do?”

Of course there are other currencies. I’ve already mentioned values. But there’s more: contribution. Performance is output against money or status, that can be measured and compared. Contribution is usefulness for others, and there’s no established metric for that. And there isn’t really a question like “What is your contribution?” either.

A teacher once told me I was ok. Not because I had achieved anything special, but because I was the way I was. I was sixteen and completely surprised that someone didn’t define my worth by a grade but by what I brought into the classroom. In that case it wasn’t performance, but honesty and sincerity. He called it exemplary. Years later someone told me that when I’m in a room, the room has a different energy. I didn’t take it as a compliment but recognised early that it was a value. A value that came about entirely without performance. It showed me that worth exists which can’t be expressed in the language of the performance society.

The problem isn’t that this currency doesn’t exist, but that it isn’t accepted. Try answering the question “What do you do?” with “I’m there and I change the energy in the room for the better.” The conversation is over.

So you invent something. You tell of projects and successes, dressed up in the language of performance, even if you don’t give everything a hundred percent truthfully, because that’s not what everyone else does either. It has nothing to do with vanity, it has to do with survival instinct. The alternative would be invisibility.

I’ve seen that many people are in the same situation. People stuck in productivity mills who feel that their real strength lies somewhere else, who could contribute something that can’t be measured in hours or revenue and unfortunately doesn’t meet social expectations.

In summary: the question “What am I worth if I don’t perform?” is fundamentally wrong, not because the answer is missing but because “perform” is the wrong verb. The right question would be: what do I contribute? It took me a long time to recognise this for myself. The answer doesn’t appear in my CV either, it sounds to me more like the teacher who said: you’re ok. Of course I can’t say that at a networking event, even though it would be honest.