When Depth Becomes Extracurricular
On the monoculture of performance, and the essential things left in the margins.
The first of two essays on the monoculture of performance. This piece examines what gets left in the margins when metrics define what matters. The next explores what happens when that scoreboard gets internalized.
In the weeks before I left KPMG, I called a former mentor to say farewell. We’d known each other for basically my whole career, and I wanted to express my gratitude. At one point during our conversation, he asked me something that surprised me:
“How did you keep that question alive for so long? The ‘what if I don’t want to keep doing this?’ Most people at some point just accept the trade, continue the climb, and stop worrying about it.”
The question really stuck with me. I didn’t have a great answer.
The honest version is that I just couldn’t bring myself to stop asking the question. A bit of rebelliousness, maybe. But that had its own cost. I held onto questions that didn’t have easy answers, and I refused to let certain parts of myself get sidelined.
But I also watched that stubbornness show up on the scoreboard. Slower advancement. Fewer of the projects that "counted." And underneath the math, something more disorienting: the feeling of being the only one. What am I not seeing that everyone else seems to know? What if they've been right this whole time and I'm the one who's wrong?
My mentor had gone the other route. He’d worked his ass off for years to reach the senior leadership ranks. And he admitted to me that he expected, once he arrived, he’d finally have the space to make his own calls, but instead, the pressures just changed shape. His bosses got more senior. The stakes got higher. The criticism when you didn’t deliver got even sharper. He’d met the quotas, made the sacrifices, trusted the implicit promise: perform now, and eventually you’ll have the freedom to focus on what really matters. Only, that freedom hadn’t really shown up yet.
Neither of us was bitter. We were just being honest about two different versions of the same cost. And I think that honesty points to something worth examining, not about one firm, but about the way high-performing environments tend to work.
If you’ve spent real time inside one of these environments, you know the currencies: deals closed, headcount managed, papers published. Whatever your organization's KPIs are, everyone knows them, and they become the central, unquestioned measure of success. And they give a clear account of how you stack up.
These metrics aren’t random. They keep institutions running. They fund salaries, create opportunities, and coordinate large groups of people toward shared goals. They’re an effective shorthand for things that are important to the organization, and that can be readily measured, toggled, and improved upon.
But over time, something subtle happens. The metrics stop being a way to measure the work and start becoming the work itself. What gets tracked defines what gets rewarded. What gets rewarded defines what gets prioritized. And anything that doesn’t translate cleanly into those terms drifts toward the margins. Not fully rejected, but slowly, structurally, deprioritized.
I once had a staff member tell me they were weighing two options: wait for a project they were genuinely excited about but hadn’t been confirmed yet, or take an immediately available assignment that would be better for their utilization numbers (even though it interested them less). They weren’t agonizing over it or anything dramatic, just doing the math. And the math was clear: the safe, trackable option was the responsible choice. The interesting one was a gamble.
That kind of calculation happens constantly in corporate environments, and it’s rarely framed as a moral dilemma. It just becomes how you think. You stop asking what do I want to work on? and start asking what will my numbers look like? Over time, the question you’re not asking anymore doesn’t feel suppressed. It just fades.
Nobody sends a memo telling people to think this way. But the incentive structure speaks clearly enough. Skipping vacation because falling behind on your numbers feels too risky. Avoiding culture work, like attending a workshop on building a healthy team culture, or mentoring beyond just delegating project tasks, because those hours don’t count toward anything that’s formally captured. The meaningful things that can’t be tracked become optional. “Nice to have.” What you do if you happen to have time left over after the real work is done.
And the things you wanted to matter: investing in whether people actually felt engaged and valued, caring about fairness and belonging on your team, having the kind of conversations that went beyond deliverables. Those things became, functionally, extracurricular. Praised in town halls or monthly newsletters, but rarely rewarded when it counted. And the people who did this work anyway, the ones most personally invested in culture and inclusion (often already marginalized), ended up carrying it as an unpaid burden on top of their formal responsibilities; their passion becoming the reason it was ok to go uncompensated.
I experienced my own version of that deprioritization, though from a different position. As a senior manager, I'd pour time into showing up for my staff. Making sure they felt confident and supported. That their voices were heard and valued. The feedback I got back was that people trusted me, respected me, genuinely enjoyed working with me. And alongside that feedback came the clear message: that’s nice, but what we really need from you is business development. Take our services to market. Build the pipeline.
I can acknowledge that those were legitimate expectations for someone at my level. And I can also be honest that I willfully chose to prioritize differently, because showing up for people felt more important and more alive than building a sales pitch. But there was a clear cost to that choice, and I felt it.
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has a name for the deeper pattern at work here. In his book The Score, he describes something he calls “value capture”: you enter a role with values that are rich and layered, and then the institution hands you a simplified measure — a score — and gradually, that score starts to stand in for everything it was supposed to represent.
Reading Nguyen, I started seeing how much of what I'd always experienced as 'just how things work' is actually designed: the daily time entry, the quarterly review, the promotion criteria. These aren’t naturally occurring. They’re painstakingly constructed conventions that encode a very specific set of priorities. And we’ve stopped noticing, because questioning the architecture of the game you’re playing feels a lot like questioning whether you belong in it.
Once you do notice, something uncomfortable comes into focus. In a metrics-dominant environment, what gets rewarded isn’t necessarily who brings the most original thinking, or who makes the people around them better. It’s who’s most thoroughly internalized the institution’s definition of “good,” or who’s most willing to double down on whatever the scoreboard tracks without much friction.
Playing that game well is genuinely hard. But the achievements it produces, the ones that feel most impressive on paper, may have less to do with what makes someone uniquely them and more to do with how completely they’ve absorbed the rules of a very particular game.
I don’t say that to diminish anyone’s work. I say it because I think it names a feeling that a lot of high performers carry beneath the surface: the suspicion that the thing you’re being praised for might not be the thing that actually matters to you. And the worry that if you stopped playing the game long enough to find out, you might not like what you’d see. And you might not be able to bounce back.
There are two versions of the cost here, and I think both deserve honest attention.
One is the cost of chasing the score. You optimize for what’s measured, and the parts of the work you originally fell in love with start to recede. Not because you stopped caring, but because caring about them doesn’t get you anywhere. Nguyen describes this in his own life: falling in love with philosophy, then spending five years writing papers he found boring because those were the ones that moved him up the rankings. By the time he noticed, he’d nearly lost the thing that drew him in.
The other cost is the one you pay for refusing to chase it. You hold onto what feels meaningful, and you watch as people who bought in more completely advance past you. I felt that sting. I watched people who started at the same time, or even after me, get promoted to levels beyond mine. And even though I’d made my own choices (two international rotations, a focus on people and culture, mentoring that didn’t translate into managed revenue) the jealousy was still there. The insidious thought: I’m just as capable. They just took the deal.
Maybe there’s some truth to that, but that’s also not the whole story. They’d worked hard. The rewards were real. And choosing an unconventional path often feels like swimming against the current, because there aren’t obvious examples of others doing the same to make you feel less alone.
I’d made my choice. I shouldn’t have felt inadequate, or envious, or like I wasn’t living up to my potential. But the truth is, I did sometimes. And I think that honesty matters, because the system’s real power isn’t just what it rewards. It’s the doubt it instills in the people who choose differently.
Both positions carry real weight. And nothing about the way these environments work makes it easy to hold them together.
I wish I could offer a clean framework for navigating all of this. I can’t, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed that they could. But I do think there are questions worth staying with, even when the answers aren’t obvious.
Because I don’t think this is really a binary between leaving and staying. That framing — the brave risk-taker who walked away versus the trapped conformist with the golden handcuffs — misses most of the people I actually know. The real question is whether you’re the one doing the deciding. Whether you've taken stock of all the things that genuinely matter to you (financial security included) and are choosing with intention. Even inside a system that doesn’t formally reward them all.
That might look different for everyone. But I think the version that matters most is this: refusing to treat the things that make you feel most alive as something you’ll get to eventually, once you’ve earned enough leverage or climbed high enough to have the space. Because, as my mentor learned, that space doesn’t reliably arrive on its own. The system’s implicit promise is perform now, depth later. But “later” keeps receding, and the parts of yourself you’ve been deferring don’t just wait patiently. They fade. Or they calcify into resentment. Or they surface at 10 p.m. on a Sunday as an uneasy feeling you can’t quite name.
If there’s something you keep gravitating toward — a way of thinking, a kind of work, a part of yourself that keeps showing up even though it doesn’t fit the system’s terms and you can’t fully explain why it matters — that pull isn’t frivolous. The fact that it doesn't map to a metric doesn't make it less real. It might make it more essential.
Figuring out how those parts still get to show up, in whatever version of your career you’re living, is uncomfortable, and slow, and rarely comes with clear validation. But it’s worth sitting with. And ultimately, it’s worth deciding for yourself.
Because you are already choosing. Every week, every project, every yes and every “just a bit longer.” What to prioritize and what to defer. What to treat as central and what to leave in the margins.
The question isn’t whether you’ll keep making those choices. It’s whether you’ll make them with the full weight of your priorities on the table. Not just the parts that fit neatly into the KPI dashboard.
Those essential parts of you that don’t fit aren’t signs of insufficient commitment. They might be the most honest signal you have.
And they deserve more than spare time.
Well conceived, well thought out and well written. I especially appreciate the fact that you aren’t bitter or critical. Just a thoughtful, insightful look into a real life dilemma. I look forward to reading part 2.