Most people confuse their paycheck with their purpose. Companies love this — because if you tie your worth to your job, you'll work weekends, tolerate nonsense, and burn out in the name of "impact." Here's the truth: your employer is buying outcomes, not your identity. Work is a transaction. Your worth lives elsewhere. Leaders who forget this become martyrs to a system that won't even remember their name once they're gone.

The Core Ideas

1. Work is rented, not owned.

• Your company doesn't "give you purpose." It gives you a W-2.
• If they stop paying, you'll stop showing up. That's not loyalty — that's economics.
• Worth comes from character, love, and legacy — not Jira tickets.

2. Outcomes vs. expectations.

• Commitments are binary: delivered or not.
• Outcomes = things you actually produce (launching the API, shipping the feature).
• Expectations = what people hope will happen after (adoption, revenue, "impact").
• Conflating the two is how leaders set people up for failure.

3. Identity detachment is strength.

• Don't romanticize your role. If you disappear, the company will backfill in a week.
• Leadership means keeping perspective: work is one part of life, not the definition of it.
• Protect your people from tying their self-worth to the sprint board.

Example: The Startup Trap

A Series B startup tells engineers their work is "changing lives." Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But when adoption numbers lag, leadership calls it a "failure of impact." The engineer who did exactly what was agreed — delivered the app on time and to spec — gets painted as falling short. This is nonsense. The outcome (app built and launched) was delivered. The expectation (mass adoption) was leadership's bet, not the engineer's responsibility.

Contrast this with a healthier approach: leaders define the contract as what will be delivered and stop there. If adoption falls flat, that's a strategy miss, not an execution miss. The engineer walks away with clarity: "I did the job. The market didn't react." That's business, not personal worth.

How Traditional Approaches Get It Wrong

• OKRs: They blur lines by baking expectations into commitments. "Launch X feature to drive Y revenue." Revenue is not a deliverable — it's a gamble.
• KPIs: Metrics turn into morality tests. Miss a number, and suddenly you're "underperforming," even if the number was fantasy to begin with.
• Agile Theater: Endless ceremonies where everyone pretends velocity equals value. Spoiler: it doesn't.

These systems institutionalize the lie that "impact" = personal worth. They conflate outcomes (which are in your control) with results (which often aren't).

Takeaway: Work is a deal. Worth is a life. Stop worshipping your job as identity, and stop punishing people for outcomes they never committed to. The moment you separate work from worth, you gain clarity, protect sanity, and lead with fairness.