You Don't Know What You're Worth

A price tag lives on commodities. Executives don't have price tags. They have ranges—and the range is a function of the room, not the résumé.

Last week I ended on a trap.

How do you know what you’re worth?

A few of you wrote in with variations on the same question: fine, but seriously—how do I know?

Here’s the harder answer.

You don’t.

And that is the point.

I Didn’t Know Mine Either

For most of my career, I could have answered that question in half a second.

I had a number. I had a rate. I knew what my time was worth because I’d done the math everyone does—what I made last year, divided by the hours, adjusted for ambition.

My earnings averaged around $300K a year. Solid. Respectable. Predictable.

Then I stopped pricing my time and started pricing what my work was worth to the person across from me.

My income more than tripled—past $1M a year—while I spent 50 to 70% less time with each client.

Read that again. Less time. More money. Higher expectations, more thrill, and more respect.

I didn’t get three times smarter that year. My résumé didn’t change. My track record didn’t change.

What changed was the question.

I stopped asking what am I worth and started asking what is this outcome worth—to this person, in this moment, with this much on the line.

Those are not the same question. The first one is self centered and the second one is market centered—a different answer in every room.

And once I saw that in my own business, I couldn’t unsee it in yours.

The Most Dangerous Career Advice Ever Given

Know your worth.

It’s on LinkedIn banners. Career coaches homepages. And on your well-meaning mentor’s lips.

And it has quietly cost executives more money than every lowball offer combined.

Because you did what the advice told you to do. You researched. You pulled the comp reports. You opened the Levels.fyi tab and cross-referenced the recruiter whispers. You triangulated a number that felt defensible.

And you walked into the room wearing that number like armor.

It wasn’t armor.

It was a ceiling. And you installed it yourself.

The moment you become certain of your worth, you’ve done the other side’s job for them. You’ve replaced their ceiling with your own—and yours is almost always lower, because yours was built from averages.

Averages of what?

Of everyone who negotiated poorly before you. The benchmark isn’t the market. The benchmark is the graveyard of accepted offers.

There’s a reason certainty feels so good in that moment, and it isn’t strategy. An open question about your own value is one of the most uncomfortable states a high performer can sit in. Your brain wants the question closed. A number—any number—ends the discomfort.

Certainty is anesthesia.

It doesn’t make you more valuable. It just makes not knowing stop hurting.

Worth Is Not a Fact. It’s an Event.

A price tag lives on a commodity. A gallon of milk. A barrel of oil. A rideshare across town.

Commodities have price tags because they’re interchangeable. One is as good as another, so the market clears at one number.

You are not interchangeable. Which means you don’t have a price.

You have a range. And the range is a function of the room, not the résumé.

Consider the same hour of the same person’s time. One buyer pays $100 for it. Another pays $50,000.

Neither of them is wrong.

They’re not disagreeing about the person’s worth. They’re each answering a completely different question: what is this worth to me, given my problem, my stakes, and my alternatives?

The $100 buyer has a small problem. The $50,000 buyer has a $50 million problem—and a genuine belief that this hour moves it.

This is what executives miss when they anchor to “market rate.”

Nobody pays you what you’re worth. They pay you a share of the value they believe you’ll create—discounted by their doubt that you’ll create it.

Which means your compensation is a function of three things, and only one of them is you:

• The size of their problem.

• The depth of their belief that you’re the one who solves it.

• And the moment—what it costs them, right now, to keep living without you.

Your job title doesn’t make the list.

The Room Gets Smaller as You Climb

I recognize that this is uncomfortable. That’s how you know you’re on the right track.

Discomfort is where growth happens. You either seek it or become complacent.

The higher you rise, the fewer rooms exist where your full value can be recognized.

There are ten thousand companies that can value a director. A few hundred that can value you at the level you’ve actually reached.

Maybe a dozen where your specific pattern of experience is worth the top of your range—where their problem and your history collide so precisely that the number stops obeying gravity.

Most executives never find those rooms. Not because the rooms don’t exist.

Because they stopped looking the moment they became certain of their number. Certainty ends the search. Why keep discovering the market when you already “know your worth”?

This is why your narrative has to sharpen as you climb, not soften.

At the top of the market, you’re no longer competing on competence—everyone in the room is competent. You’re competing on precision. The buyer who values you highest needs to recognize their exact problem in your exact story, fast.

Vague seniority gets benchmark offers.

Precise relevance breaks the band.

What Certainty Costs

A prospective client came to me earlier this year already certain—and boasting about their negotiation acumen from a top investment banking program.

He’d done everything right. Pulled the data. Talked to peers. Landed on his number—call it $1.3M—and defended it beautifully through the process. The offer came in at $1.3M almost to the dollar.

He felt like he’d won. We didn’t end up working together.

But the problem was that the approved range went meaningfully higher.

The board had already blessed a number over double what he asked for. I knew this because the company hired two other executives meaningfully higher just a few weeks earlier.

One was a client of mine with 10 years less experience in a peer-adjacent title. His deal landed 90% higher per year and nearly 8 figures more over a standard 4-year period. The other was reporting into the same team, not a client FWIW, but a stronger negotiator.

She brought in 30% more.

The budget existed. The willingness existed.

The only thing standing between him and that money was his own certainty.

And he didn’t even ask.

Nobody lowballed him. Nobody played games.

He named a number, they met it, everyone shook hands—and a fortune stayed in a spreadsheet he never knew existed.

This is the quiet violence of “know your worth.” The companies don’t even have to negotiate you down.

You arrive pre-negotiated even when they already had the upper hand.

Compare that to the clients who come in curious instead of certain. Who treat the process as discovery. Who ask more than they declare. Those are the engagements where we’re not fighting for 10% over the band—we’re finding out the band was never the real ceiling in the first place.

The certain executive defends a number.

The curious executive discovers a market.

I want to be clear that you don’t always need to pull every last ounce out of a deal. If you’ve named a number that works for you and everyone aligns on it, I’m not suggesting that you’ve made some terminal error or should be reprimanded.

I’m simply suggesting that the ceiling is likely higher than you think.

Trade Declaration for Discovery

So what can you tactically change about you don’t know what you’re worth?

You stop trying to answer the question and start running the discovery.

Watch the difference.

Script A—the certain executive:

“Based on my research, market rate for this role is $580–620K in total compensation. That’s my expectation.”

Sounds strong. Feels strong. And it just handed them your ceiling, wrapped in a bow, before you learned a single thing about what this role is worth to them.

Script B—the curious executive:

“Before we get to numbers—help me understand what this role needs to accomplish. What does the business look like eighteen months from now if this hire goes exactly right? And what does it cost us if it goes wrong?”

Script B isn’t a deflection. It’s the actual work.

Because their answers tell you what room you’re standing in. If the honest answer is “this role protects $200M in revenue,” you are not in a $600K conversation anymore—no matter what the benchmark says. And now they’ve said it, out loud, in their own words. You didn’t argue your value.

They discovered it.

That’s the whole mechanic. When you declare your worth, you’re selling. When they articulate what solving their problem is worth, the number that follows belongs to a different universe than the one in the comp report.

A few rules for the practice:

• Never name the number that ends the search. Every figure you state with certainty becomes the top of your range. Silence and questions keep the range open.
  

• Anchor to their outcome, not your history. Your last comp is what someone else’s problem was worth. It says nothing about this one.
  

• Treat every process as market research. Even the deals you walk away from are data. Each conversation updates your model of what’s possible—which is the only way the model ever moves up.

And the rule underneath all of them, the one I left you with last week:

• Never be so sure of your worth that you wouldn’t accept more.

You’re Not Supposed to Know

Here’s where this lands.

You don’t know what you’re worth sounds like bad news. It isn’t. It’s the best news in your career.

Because if worth were a fact—fixed, knowable, printed on a tag—then the benchmark would be the truth and the band would be the law and the best you could ever do is arrive at your number.

But worth isn’t a fact. It’s an event.

It happens in a room, between a specific problem and a specific person, at a specific moment. Which means it can happen bigger. In a better room. With a buyer whose problem is the exact shape of your story.

The executives who capture the top of the market are not the ones most certain of their value.

They’re the ones most curious about it.

Stop trying to know your worth.

Start discovering it.

Work with me directly. Every session credits toward representation.

Stay fearless, friends.