A New Metric for Creative Success

“How to Measure Success When the Metrics aren’t Moving”

You’ve built a strong habit of showing up.

You do the work. You keep telling yourself that patience is the price of growth, that if you just stay consistent, if you just keep showing up, something will eventually shift.

But days become weeks, and the graph stays flat. The numbers don’t move. You tell yourself it’s fine, that you’re doing this for you and yet still, you check.

You open the dashboard like a compulsive gambler. You refresh the stats when you wake up, after dinner and throughout the day.

You re‑read your own post, half hoping it sounds better the second time. You watch the view count climb by one and pretend it means something, because at least one proves you still exist.

And in that small, silent ritual of refreshing, waiting, refreshing and hoping, your sense of self becomes tethered to numbers that will never love you back.

The line between progress and validation starts to blur. You begin to confuse attention with worth, growth with meaning and momentum with purpose. And when none of it comes, the absence feels like indictment. You start to think you’re failing, not just at writing, but at life itself.

It’s a quiet, internal collapse. Not one big event but a gradual erosion of the excitement and energy you once had. Somewhere along the way, you stopped measuring the things that mattered and let someone else’s metric become the yardstick of your own success.

But what if the failure you feel isn’t failure at all? What if you’ve just been measuring the wrong things?

The Tyranny of Modern Metrics

Humans are not wired for modern metrics.

The brain is built to seek signals of safety and danger. But those signals used to be felt in the physical world. In the body, in the tribe, in the land beneath your feet, in a planted field, a fire that kept burning or a conversation that left you full.

The modern dashboard offers none of this. It offers abstractions. Numbers. Arrows. Blue dots and grey lines. It offers the illusion of control without the sensation of security.

And yet, we cling to it. We check the view count. We stare at the follower graph. We measure our self-worth in likes, comments, and email open rates, and when you whittle it down it is all fear based.

We are afraid we don’t matter, afraid we’re behind that our work is invisible, and metrics, even if for a brief moment, soothe that fear.

It’s the same dopamine circuit that lights up in slot machines and social media notifications, it’s a system hijacked to reward behaviour that feels productive, even when it’s empty.

The brain doesn’t distinguish between genuine progress and hollow feedback. A rising number still feels like winning and a dip still feels like a failure to be ashamed of.

The thing to understand here is that numbers may create momentum, but not meaning, and over time the chase corrodes the very thing you came here to build: your unique voice, a body of work and a sense of self in motion.

Even the research betrays us. KPI (Key performance index) frameworks are built to track performance, not fulfilment. While productivity increases, well-being is not taken into consideration.

The modern machine just assumes that if you are more productive you are automatically more fulfilled. KPIs optimise for efficiency, they sharpen our output, but in the process flatten our sense of meaning. And that’s the quiet rot beneath the entire creator economy:

Creators are working harder than ever. They’re growing faster than ever. But they feel emptier than ever.

Cal Newport wrote about the “metrics black hole.” The phenomenon where tracking your output begins to cannibalise the quality of your input.

The pull is real. The very act of checking the stats gives you a dopamine hit. That sense of anticipation just before the numbers load can be addictive. But the problem is that what lights up the dashboard does not always light up your internal truth…that is the balancing act that every creator must learn to navigate.

Emotional ROI: A Different Metric for Meaningful Work

If metrics fail to tell the whole story, then what does?

What keeps you coming back to the work when the numbers flatline?

What keeps your voice intact when the dopamine dries up?

Emotional ROI.

Not in the self-help sense of “do what you love.” But in the deeper, slower sense of meaningful return on emotional investment.

This is what we miss when we track growth but not resonance. When we ask how many people clicked, but never how it felt to show up that day.

When we write for approval instead of writing for coherence, and then wonder why the work feels empty even when the response is good.

Emotional ROI isn’t a KPI. It’s not something you measure weekly. It’s something you feel, in the gut, after months of presence.

It’s the shift from output to integration.

From: “How many pieces did I publish?”

To: “What did this process return to me emotionally, energetically and even existentially?”

Because when the work aligns it doesn’t drain you, it nourishes you.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy or always joyful. What it does mean is you walk away clearer than you arrived and, most importantly, it means you like who you are when you’re creating it.

It means the process is not hijacking your nervous system, but regulating it and restoring a sense of internal coherence, and that coherence is not a luxury. It is the biological prerequisite for meaningful long-term output.

If the brain is in a constant state of fight or flight it loses access to the deeper, slower circuitry required for original thought. In that sense, Emotional ROI is not a soft metric. It’s a foundational one, and so no “consistency” will save you, if your creative rhythm is bankrupting your nervous system.

How to Measure Emotional ROI (And Actually Use It)

The trouble with emotional ROI is that you can’t track it on a dashboard.

It doesn’t show up in your Substack analytics. There’s no chart to tell you when you’re heading toward burnout or alignment.

But you can sense it intuitively. Like any metric that matters, emotional ROI isn’t found in a single moment. It accumulates quietly over time.

So instead of asking, How did it perform? Begin asking, What did it give me back?

After each post or launch pause and sit with these questions

• Did this process leave me more grounded… or more scattered?

• Did I lose myself in performance… or find myself in the rhythm?

• Did I feel proud of what I made … or just relieved that it’s over?

• Would I make this again, even if nobody responded?

• Did I chase energy, or did I create something that sustains it?

These are not productivity hacks. They are orientation tools designed to help you return to yourself. The more you ask them, the sharper your internal compass becomes.

This is the part the algorithms can’t measure. The part the growth charts never capture. The invisible dividend paid only to those who stay with their work long enough to notice what it’s actually doing to them.

That’s what I mean by emotional ROI. It’s not only a feeling, It’s a recognisable pattern. If the return is always stress, confusion, urgency, or shame, then no matter how successful the numbers look, your creative account is running at a loss.

The risk of addiction to modern metrics should not be underestimated. Most platforms have hired the brightest minds on the planet earth to engineer the most addictive environment possible.

What most people don’t appreciate is that they are not just designed with passive consumers in mind but also for the creators that fuel attention…just because you create do not assume that you are any more immune than a passive consumer.

It is essential to create and hold onto systems which protect you from dopamine addiction.

If this resonates with you at all , I’ve put together something that might help.

It’s called the 15-Note System, and dozens of writers have already told me it’s changed the way they think about growth, voice, and visibility when it comes to short-form writing.

If you’re ready to build something real, it’s there when you’re ready.

Take care and be sure to protect your energy,

Benjamin