Visual effects (VFX) company Rhythm & Hues declared bankruptcy on February 11, 2013, laying off 254 people in the process. 

Huge failure, right?

Let’s back up. Rhythm & Hues was founded in 1987 and won its first Academy Award for Babe in 1995. Its second Academy Award came from The Golden Compass in 2008. But its third Academy Award was bestowed on February 24, 2013 for The Life of Pi.

That’s right. They won an academy award just 13 days after filing for bankruptcy.

Metrics matter.

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.”

Next time you’re about to judge yourself or your work, consider the method by which you’re measuring.

Are you measuring yourself…

• …against a celebrity? Your hero? A friend? A stranger on the Internet? 
• …by this month? A quarter? This year? Lifetime achievement? 
• …on existing results or future impact? On what you’ve learned or what you’ve achieved?

Rhythm & Hues has three Academy Awards and their resume reads like a dream list of blockbuster Hollywood movies . That represents more success than most of us could dream of.

Keith Goldfarb, founder of Rhythm & Hues, summed it up perfectly:

“A lot of people look at 25 years and then we go out of business in year 26, and ask “Well, what did they do wrong?” I’m sorry: 25 years – what did we do right?”

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is what it seems. 

Pick the metric that is most meaningful to you and measure that. And if you’re not sure which metric to pick, I find that measuring myself against who I was and what I accomplished yesterday is usually a good bet.

Life After Pi

For the full story of Rhythm & Hues, what went right, and how the VFX industry’s broken economic model let one of the great studios to bankruptcy (along with 20 others between 2003-2013), check out this excellent 30-min documentary: