The corporate and political elite who gathered in Davos last week are not your peers. They know nothing of you, care not a whit for you. They are aliens, people with allegiance to no place who are willing to sacrifice any place in their insatiable hunger for profit and production.

They are not like you. So why use their metrics — the metrics of constant growth and relentless accumulation of money and power over others — to determine your worth?

Choose your own metrics.

Are you among friends? Do you love something? Do you find delight in the course of your day?

Did you hear a fine story, read a great book? Did you make someone laugh?

Are you doing work that matters? Are you curious? Are you learning? Do you seek out expertise in others? Do you surround yourself with people who know things you don’t know, places that contain knowledge you do not possess?

Do you know how to be silent? Do you know how to be alive in your body, alive in the world?

You are not your resume. You are the trail you’ve left behind, the people you’ve influenced, the work you’ve done.

Seth Godin

You are the trail.