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How do you define impact? It's more personal than we admit...
Everyone in my world talks about impact. Investors want it, founders promise it, decks are drenched in it. But ask ten people to define it and you'll get ten answers — and most go quiet if you push for a second sentence.
I've come to think that's not a flaw to fix. It's the truth of the thing. Impact is hard to pin down because it's genuinely subjective — and pretending otherwise is how the word turns to marketing.
Smart people have disagreed for a long time
This isn't new. Aristotle placed the good life in eudaimonia — flourishing, a life lived well and in full, measured across a lifetime rather than a quarter. Peter Singer takes almost the opposite line: good is something we can count and compare, and we're obliged to do the most of it we can, for whoever needs it most. Viktor Frankl, writing out of a concentration camp, landed somewhere else again — meaning isn't handed to us, it's found, in the specific responsibility each of us is given.
Three serious thinkers, three different compasses: flourishing, measurable good, personal meaning. None of them is wrong. Which tells you something — there is no single ledger where impact gets tallied.
Which is exactly why the word gets abused
Because impact is subjective, it's easy to claim and hard to check. That's how it becomes a mood — a warm adjective you sprinkle on a pitch. I keep one rule about this, for our own copy and our own ventures: if you say impact, you have to name the value. Who is better off, and how would you know? The moment you can't answer, you're not describing impact. You're decorating.
So I hold both things at once. The definition is personal — and the proof has to be real.
Define it for yourself, then make it measurable
You get to decide what "better" means. For one founder it's carbon kept out of the air. For another it's a nurse who gets an hour of her shift back. For another it's an institution that can withstand an attack it couldn't have survived last year. Nobody can hand you that definition — it comes from what you care about and what you've seen.
But once you've chosen it, the subjectivity ends and the work begins. Pick the person whose life should change. Say how you'd measure the change. Build the thing, then check whether it moved.
You don't have to save the world
Here's the part I actually believe. You don't need a grand, world-scale definition to be allowed to create impact. You need to leave your own corner of it a little better than you found it — in whatever you happen to be doing. A better product. A fairer deal. One person who would have had a harder day without you, and an easier one because of you.
Marcus Aurelius kept returning to a plain idea: do the work in front of you well, and do it for the common good, not the applause. That scales down to any life and any job. Impact isn't reserved for people running foundations. It's available to anyone willing to define it honestly and then be held to it.
How we hold ourselves to it
At Co-Labs this isn't a values slide — it's a design constraint. Before we build a venture, it has to answer the same two questions: who is better off, and how would we measure it. If it can't, we don't dress it up in the word. We change the venture, or we don't build it.
That's the whole discipline. Let the definition be personal. Refuse to let the proof be vague.
So — how do you define impact? I can't answer that for you. But I'd push you to answer it for yourself, in one honest sentence, and then go create some at your level. That's the only version that counts.
