A few years ago I was speaking at a big event in Orlando. The room was massive, the stage was incredible, and I got to share the lineup with two of my friends.

But there was a problem.

When my first friend came offstage, he seemed rattled.

“That was rough.” he said.

I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about. I told him I thought he’d done a great job, and that the audience loved it. But he didn’t seem convinced.

The next day, it was my turn to speak. I got up onstage, launched into my opening story, and got to the first punchline.

And the crowd... went... MILD!

To be fair, the joke got a few chuckles. But it was not what I was used to. That joke usually kills!

Every story, joke, and point I made the rest of the talk felt the same. It felt like the volume had been turned down on the audience’s response. But hey, sometimes you have a bad day. Nobody bats a thousand, right?

I got offstage, and my friend came up to me. “You killed it, man!”

I laughed. “Eh, it felt like a struggle, if I’m honest.”

He looked confused. “Dude, they were dying laughing! The lady next to me had tears coming down her face.”

I was confused, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I took off my microphone and made my way out from backstage. When I got into the room, there was a line of people waiting to talk to me. They told me they loved the talk, showed me the notes they’d taken, and asked if we could take a picture together.

As the room emptied out, another speaker stepped onstage for her sound check. Her team was in the audience, and she asked them how her slides looked. A team member said "They look great!"

The speaker repeated the question, and the team member repeated the answer a little louder. They did this several more times before the woman onstage finally heard what her team member was saying.

That's when it all clicked.

You couldn’t hear the audience from the stage.

I don’t know if it was the strange acoustics of the giant ballroom, the setup of the stage, or some mystical force that was hell-bent on rattling the performers, but it all made sense now: it wasn't that the performers were bombing, it was just that they couldn't hear the audience feedback telling them that they were doing great.

That night, I had dinner with my friend who was speaking the next day. I told her “Just a heads up, you can’t really hear the audience. But I promise you, they’re great. Don’t let it rattle you like it rattled me.”

Ever since then, I’ve noticed the same pattern again and again: a communication gap between a creator and their audience that leads to bad results.

Sometimes it's like Orlando, where the gap causes the creator to think their work isn’t making an impact.

But I've also noticed the opposite: a false positive that makes a creator think their work is having a larger impact than it actually is.

In 2016, Facebook admitted that for the preceding two years, they had drastically inflated the statistics that creators saw in their dashboards. One lawsuit alleged that Facebook overstated watchtime metrics by up to 900% of their actual value.

This one bit of exaggerated feedback changed entire businesses. When companies saw that video content on Facebook outperformed video content on other platforms, they pivoted hard to producing more Facebook content and spent more money on Facebook ads. Major organizations shut down their own video sites, laid off staff, and focused all their efforts on Facebook.

When those numbers turned out to be a lie, the damage was already done.

The Orlando speaking event and the Facebook video fiasco seem like opposites, but they're just two sides of the same coin. In one case, an audience's disinterest felt greater than it actually was, and in the other the audience's enthusiasm turned out to be overstated.

In both cases, the solution is the same: learning to identify the real signals of success and separating them from the noise.

For my speaker friends in Orlando, it meant recognizing that a line of people who wanted to meet you meant that the speech had been a hit, regardless of how it felt in the moment. For Facebook creators, it meant recognizing that an impressive number on a metrics dashboard doesn't mean anything if it doesn't drive real business results.

The creators who avoid this trap aren't the ones who learn to ignore feedback, and they're not the ones who trust every signal they receive. They're the ones who get intentional about which signals they pay attention to and which ones they ignore. They're the ones who define their own metrics for success and focus relentlessly on those.

So here's the question for you: in your current situation, what signal would you trust even if every other bit of feedback disagreed with it?

Focus on that answer and tune out the noise.

Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one.

Kyle Scheele
Helping Organizations Build and Launch Better Ideas, Faster.
​Hire Me to Speak​