Suneet Singal on whose definition of success you are using

Suneet Singal has a video on his channel titled Whose Definition of Success Are You Using? This page treats that title as a question the video raises. It is a video on the channel, not a confirmed episode of The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal, and the title is not a quotation of his advice. A choice inherits its meaning from the test used to judge it. If the test is borrowed from a neighbor, a headline, or an old habit, the work can succeed on paper and still miss the reason anyone started. Writing the definition down is a way to see whose scoreboard is in the room. His published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance, settings where a project can look busy for a long time before anyone says what a good result would be. The same silence happens in a family budget and a community program. This entry explains how to choose a definition on purpose, and how to keep a good decision distinct from a lucky outcome.

A video on the channel raises the question

A video on Suneet Singal's channel is titled Whose Definition of Success Are You Using? The title raises the question this page teaches. Call the piece a video on the channel. Do not call it a confirmed episode of the podcast The Opportunity Notebook with Suneet Singal. The episode that is confirmed, and listed on the podcast page, is the one titled What Decision Are You Actually Trying to Make? That episode has a matching YouTube title. The success video is a separate public video. Neither title is a quotation of his advice, and this page does not invent remarks to put beside them. His published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. That sentence is biography. It is not a scoreboard, and it is not evidence that a particular project met a particular test.

The question in the video title belongs next to the naming question. A decision sentence says what you will commit to. A definition of success says how you will know the commitment was aimed at the right thing. You can name a decision cleanly and still grade it with someone else's ruler. The companion page, what decision you are actually trying to make, is the place to write the commitment. This page is the place to write the test. Groups that skip the test often declare victory because the work happened. Activity is easy to see. A definition is a sentence you can fail, which is why people leave it unwritten.

Use the two pages as a pair and the podcast page as the index of episodes. If a later conversation claims that Suneet Singal said a particular definition was the right one, ask for the sentence on a page you can open. A title is an invitation to think. It is not a finding. The work of choosing a definition remains with the people who will live with the result. This entry gives them a way to do that work in writing, with sources that are about decision quality rather than about any private standard of his.

A definition is a test you can fail

A usable definition of success names a condition you could fail to meet. The condition is observable enough that a person who was not in the room could apply it. More attendance is a direction. At least forty residents stay through the full Saturday program, counted from the sign-in sheet, is a test. The second sentence can be wrong, and it can be revised. It cannot be quietly satisfied by a pleasant feeling. Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, in their Harvard Business Review article on hidden traps, describe framing as the way a problem is stated. A definition of success is part of that frame. If the frame only contains hopes, every outcome can be narrated as a kind of success, and the narration teaches the group nothing.

Write the test before you fall in love with an option. Once an option is charming, the test tends to grow a pocket that the option already fits. That is not a moral failure. It is the ordinary gravity of a plan. The cure is sequence. First the decision sentence, from the companion page. Then the test. Then the options, scored against the test you already wrote. If a beloved option fails the test, you have learned something about the option or something about the test. Both lessons are available only because the test existed early enough to be independent.

A definition can include more than one line, and it should still be short. Three lines are usually enough: the result you want, the people for whom that result counts, and the date by which you will look. A fourth line can name what you refuse to count. We will not treat press mentions as success if the Saturday program is empty. Negative lines are useful because borrowed scoreboards often sneak in through the side door of publicity, headcount, or someone else's applause. Say which applause you are willing to ignore.

Borrowed scoreboards

Most people arrive with a scoreboard already in their pocket. A family has one. A profession has one. A social feed has several, and they change by the week. Borrowing is not always a mistake. A nurse's definition of a safe shift, or a teacher's definition of a student who can now do the work alone, is a scoreboard built from real practice. The error is using a scoreboard you never chose, then feeling surprised when the work optimizes for it. Ask, in writing, whose definition this is. If the honest answer is my uncle's, or the last conference I attended, or whatever would look impressive in a newsletter, you are allowed to keep it. You are also allowed to notice that you kept it.

Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony warn that teams fall in love with a proposal and then minimize its risks. A borrowed definition is one way the love story stays intact. The proposal looks successful because the definition was cut to the proposal's shape, or because the definition was imported from a field where a different proposal would have been the obvious winner. Their article asks decision makers to examine the recommendation, including whether the team is attached to it. Attachment to a scoreboard is harder to see than attachment to a vendor. Write the source of the scoreboard in the margin. A definition with a named source can be thanked and set aside. A definition with no source feels like common sense, which is the most expensive costume a borrowed idea can wear.

Suneet Singal's background in real estate and corporate finance is a reminder that industries carry scoreboards of their own. Occupancy, margin, a closed transaction, a title on a door: each can be a legitimate measure inside a stated decision, and each can be a trespasser in a decision about something else. This page does not say which measure he uses. It says that a reader in any field, including those, should be able to point to the measure on the page and say who brought it into the room. If you cannot point, you are grading with a ruler you have not inspected.

A good decision and a lucky outcome

A good outcome is what happened. A good decision is a choice that was well aimed at the time, given the alternatives you actually had and the information you could honestly have used. The two come apart in both directions. A careful choice can meet a storm. A careless choice can meet good weather. If you grade only the weather, you will copy the careless choice the next time the sky looks similar. Kahneman's Nobel Prize recognized work that brought psychological research into the study of judgment under uncertainty. One practical lesson from that tradition, and from the later Harvard Business Review checklist, is that the quality of the thinking deserves its own review. The outcome still matters. It is not the only record.

This is why a definition of success should be dated. On the day you choose, write what you are trying to make true, and write what you are not promising. You are not promising to control the weather, the other party's mood, or the news cycle. You are promising to aim at a stated test with stated alternatives. When the result arrives, read the old sentence before you write the story. Did you hit the test you wrote? Did the test turn out to be the wrong test? Those are different lessons, and they suggest different changes. Mixing them produces the dull conclusion that things went well or things went badly, which is too coarse to teach anyone.

There is a humane version of this distinction. People who did the careful work should not be punished for a storm, and people who skipped the work should not be promoted for sunshine. Institutions that cannot tell those cases apart drift toward whatever is easiest to narrate. A one-page note, filed on the day of the choice, is a modest institution. It will not fix a culture by itself. It will give a later meeting something firmer than memory. The page on the decision memo shows a place to put that note. The definition is one of its lines, not a speech to be delivered after the result is known.

Several audiences, one primary test

A choice often has more than one audience. A volunteer program may matter to the people who attend, to the neighbors who hear the noise, to the donors who paid for the chairs, and to the organizers who wanted a reason to work together. Each audience has a plausible definition of success. If you adopt all of them at full strength, you have adopted none. Every result will satisfy someone, and the debrief will be a tour of those satisfactions. Pick a primary test. Name the other audiences as constraints or as secondary notes. The primary test is the one you are willing to fail in public. The constraints are the conditions under which you refuse to pursue it, such as a noise rule or a spending cap.

The order is a decision of its own, and it should be made by the person who has authority to close the main decision. An advisor from the donor group will understandably offer the donor's test. That offer is information. It becomes the definition only if the decider adopts it and writes it down. Hidden traps include the pull of the status quo and the pull of the first number anyone speaks. The first audience to speak can become the status quo of the scoreboard. Thank them, write their test in the secondary column, and ask whether it is truly the reason the work exists. If it is, promote it openly. A promoted test is honest. A test that won because it spoke first is an accident.

Once the primary test is chosen, translate it into the decision sentence. We will choose the program that gives the primary test the best honest chance, within the constraints. Options that serve only a secondary audience can remain visible, and they should be labeled as such. This is how a group avoids the sulk that comes from winning the wrong game. People can see which game was played. They can argue, next time, for a different primary test. They cannot claim they were not told.

A labeled hypothetical about a volunteer season

This is a labeled hypothetical. The club, the numbers, and the disagreement are invented. A neighborhood tutoring club must decide what a good season is before it decides the Saturday schedule. Three definitions are on the table. The treasurer's definition: end the season with at least the $1,200 the club held in May, because the reserve has always been the treasurer's test. The tutor's definition: each returning student completes the practice set they could not complete in September. The founder's cousin, who does not tutor, offers a third: a photo in the town paper. All three are real desires. They are not the same success. The club's decision sentence, already drafted, is whether to run eight Saturdays of math practice or four Saturdays of a public showcase.

If the club refuses to pick a primary test, the showcase will tend to win, because it produces the photo and it looks like an event. The practice set produces no photograph. Under the tutor's definition, eight quiet Saturdays may be the successful season even if the reserve dips by a small amount and the paper never calls. Under the treasurer's definition, the club should choose the option that protects $1,200, which might mean fewer Saturdays or a fee. Under the cousin's definition, the showcase is the point, and learning is a pleasant side effect. The hypothetical asks the club to write one primary test on the agenda and to mark the others as constraints or as notes. Suppose they write the tutor's test as primary, and they write a constraint that the season will not spend the reserve below $800. The cousin's photo becomes a note, welcome if it happens and irrelevant if it does not.

The figures are made up so the conflict is easy to see. They are not a study of tutoring, not a recommended budget, and not a claim about any program connected to Suneet Singal. What the story illustrates is the moment of selection. Somebody's definition will govern the schedule. Writing the name of that somebody, and the sentence of the test, is the whole method. After the season, the club can ask two separate questions. Did students complete the practice sets? Did we wish, in hindsight, that the primary test had been the reserve? The first question grades the season. The second grades the definition. Keeping them apart is what makes the next season smarter than a mood.

When the definition should be rewritten

A definition is not a tattoo. Rewrite it when the people who are affected change, when the constraint you named turns out to be the actual point, or when you learn that the test cannot be observed. An unobservable test, such as a deeper appreciation, can remain as a hope. It cannot remain as the only line, because nobody will be able to say whether it happened. Pair a hope with an observable proxy, and admit that the proxy is a proxy. Attendance is not understanding. It is a count you can keep while you look for a better test. Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony ask whether a team would want different information if it had to decide again in a year. One piece of information is whether the definition itself held up. Schedule that question.

Rewrite in the open. A quiet swap, after the result is known, is how a group cheats at its own game and then forgets that it cheated. If the paper runs a photo and the practice sets go unfinished, the club can decide that publicity was the real test only by saying so as a new decision about the next season. It cannot move the goal during the debrief and call the season a success under a rule written afterward. The page on base rates is useful here when the test itself depends on how often a kind of program works. The page on narrow framing is useful when a single Saturday is being graded as if the season did not exist. Bring those pages in when the definition is doing too much work alone.

Leave a one-line archive. Date, primary test, constraint, and who adopted them. The archive is dull, and dull is what you want. A future volunteer can see whose definition was in force without reconstructing it from a speech. The video on the channel asked whose definition you are using. The answer this page recommends is a sentence with a name and a date, specific enough to fail, and willing to be replaced by an equally specific sentence when the work changes. That is a modest standard. It is also the standard that keeps a success from being whoever spoke last.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

Read this beside what decision you are actually trying to make, then expected value without fake precision and narrow framing. The podcast, as distinct from the channel video, is indexed at the podcast page.