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Shane's Domain Auction Picks for Friday January 23rd

Shane's Domain Auction Picks for Friday January 23rd

Shane Cultra
January 23, 2026

The Art of Setting KPIs in Life, Work, and When Not to Set Any at All

The KPI, Key Performance Indicator, is a term you hear all the time at work. For many young salespeople, it is their lifeline of income, their entire goal. Humans thrive on goals. You need a north star to guide you to where you want to be. KPIs in business are usually rewarded with money, but in life success is measured in all forms. It could be winning a championship, building a better relationship, finishing a race, or simply being healthier.

Goals are what drive us, but the only thing worse than not having a KPI is setting them too high or setting them based on things a person cannot control.

I learned this the hard way.

I once had a production manager who did a great job growing trees. We wanted to give him KPIs and reward him for what we considered a good or bad year. If a certain percentage of his trees sold, he would get a bonus. We had a good year, but of our total sales, the trees he grew were average. He was extremely upset.

And he was right to be.

He had a 95 percent success rate on trees he planted and dug for sale, up 20 percent versus the last grower. What he could not control was how many of those trees sold after they left his fields. That was a KPI for the salespeople, not for him. I should have set KPIs based on what he could control.

Even then, I had to define them in a way that a third party could understand. Saying the fields should be clean and weed free sounds good, but what does that mean? My idea of clean? Someone else’s idea of clean? That does not work. KPIs cannot be opinion. This is not about how something feels, it is about what can be measured.

The same goes for KPIs set too high.

As we said, people love goals, especially if there are real rewards at the end. But if you make the goal too big, regardless of the reward, a person eventually stops reaching for it. At some point the thought becomes, this is not worth the extra time because it is not achievable. The carrot is too far away and the horse stops moving.

I find bad KPIs are often put out by people who are new and not experts in the area they are setting them for. They do not have enough information yet. Sometimes a single bad event can put a KPI out of reach, but more often it is a bad boss or manager who set it too high. I have been that guy. Half the time it was lack of knowledge, the other half was ignoring real-world factors like bad weather impacting salespeople who made their living selling product in good weather.

That brings me to the KPIs of life.

The people I enjoy spending time with most are driven by goals, but not so analytical that they have to chart and write everything down. They have their goals in their head. They are always reaching for them, but it is not obsessive. They are personally driven and able to stay on track while adjusting on the fly. Easygoing, but goal driven.

Their KPIs are final goals, not daily checklists. They can skip something one day and be fine with it. Those are the people who can handle it when things go sideways, because they can step out of routine without becoming anxious when a day or a week is painfully out of whack.

That, to me, is the art. Knowing when to measure, what to measure, and when to simply move forward without measuring at all.

Quote of the Day:“A goal properly set is halfway reached.”— Zig Ziglar

Domain of the Day:DNLabs.com Domain investors love this one

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