The air in the small conference room is exactly 77 degrees, a temperature that feels thick and recycled, like the breath of the 27 people who sat here before me today. My manager, a man who usually talks with his hands, is suddenly still. He is looking at a tablet screen, his thumb hovering over a PDF that contains the verdict of my last 367 days of labor. I can see the reflection of the blue light in his glasses. He clears his throat, a sound that feels like a dry leaf skittering across pavement, and then he says the words that turn my stomach into a cold knot: ‘You met expectations. We’re giving you a 3.7 rating.’

I feel a strange buzzing in my ears. A 3.7 out of 7? I spent 17 weeks leading the cross-departmental integration that saved the company $77,000 in redundant licensing fees. I stayed until 22:07 nearly every Tuesday for 7 months to mentor the new hires because nobody else would. I hit 107 percent of my targets. But as he keeps talking, the reality of the ‘calibration committee’ begins to leak out. It doesn’t matter what I did. It matters that the budget only allowed for 7 percent of the staff to be labeled ‘exceptional,’ and those spots were reserved for the senior directors’ hand-picked successors. I am not a person here; I am a data point being squeezed into a bell curve that was designed 47 years ago by people who didn’t believe in the internet, let alone remote collaboration.

The Ritual of Demotivation

This is the Great Corporate Ritual of Demotivation. We pretend it’s about ‘growth’ and ‘development,’ but that’s a lie we all agree to tell so the HR software doesn’t crash from the weight of our collective resentment. I recently spent 277 minutes reading the entire Terms and Conditions of our employee handbook-yes, the whole thing, all 47 sections-and nowhere does it mention that your soul will be quantified by a committee of people who haven’t seen you work in 367 days. The terms are clear, though: we are units of production, and units must be categorized to keep the payroll predictable.

The Binary Reality of Blake M.

Take Blake M., for instance. He is a medical equipment courier I met last year when I was spiraling after my previous review. Blake M. doesn’t have a ‘calibration committee.’ If he delivers 27 heart valves to 27 surgeons and those 27 surgeries go well because the equipment was sterile and on time, he has succeeded. There is no manager telling Blake M. that he ‘met expectations’ but failed to ‘demonstrate thought leadership in the logistics space’ to justify denying him a raise. Blake M. deals in the binary of reality: the blood arrives, or it doesn’t.

He told me once, while waiting for a signature, that the moment you let a stranger who doesn’t know your name define your worth with a decimal point, you’ve already lost the game. He’s 47 years old and has more clarity about his value than any Senior VP I’ve ever met.

But in the office, we’ve built a system that actively punishes the Blakes of the world. Performance reviews are not tools for development; they are bureaucratic paper trails designed to justify why you aren’t getting that 7 percent raise you earned. They create a zero-sum game where for me to be ‘great,’ my cube-mate has to be ‘average.’ Think about what that does to a team. If I help you with your project for 17 hours this week, I am literally lowering my own chances of a top rating because I am making you look better relative to me. The system rewards the self-promoters, the people who spend 37 percent of their day talking about what they are going to do instead of actually doing it. It rewards the people who keep their best ideas hidden so they can ‘reveal’ them at the exact moment the calibration window opens.

We’ve infantilized professionals. We treat grown adults with 27 years of experience like children getting a report card. ‘Needs improvement in sharing toys,’ the manager says, though they call it ‘cross-functional synergy.’ It’s a mechanism of control. By keeping the majority of the workforce in the ‘meets expectations’ bucket, the organization maintains a permanent state of mild insecurity. If you’re a 3.7, you’re just good enough to keep, but not important enough to be expensive. It’s a strategy for retention through mediocrity.

I remember a specific Tuesday, exactly 7 weeks ago, when I realized the absurdity of it all. I was filling out my self-assessment, trying to find 7 different ways to use the word ‘impact’ without sounding like a dictionary. I realized I was lying. I wasn’t writing about what I learned or how I helped the company; I was writing a legal defense for my own existence. I was trying to prove that my 2,007 hours of work this year were worth more than the 2,007 hours of the person sitting across from me. It felt dirty. It felt like I was betraying the very people I spent my life working with.

When we reduce a year of complex, messy, beautiful human effort to a single digit ending in a decimal, we lose the ‘why’ behind the work. We lose the intrinsic motivation-the internal drive to do something well because it’s worth doing. Instead, we replace it with extrinsic anxiety. We become like lab rats waiting for a pellet that we know is only going to be given to 7 percent of the colony.

The Fitactions model is about intrinsic motivation and personal progress, not external validation or ranking against others, which is why the corporate world finds it so threatening. It suggests that a person’s value isn’t something that can be ‘calibrated’ in a 47-minute meeting by people drinking lukewarm coffee. You can find more about this shift in perspective at Fitactions, where the focus stays on the actual movement of the individual rather than the static judgment of the institution.

I think back to Blake M. again. He once told me about a time he had to deliver a specialized stent 107 miles through a snowstorm. He didn’t do it for a rating. He did it because there was a person on a table who needed it. When he finished, he didn’t wait for a 47-page feedback report. He felt the cold air in his lungs and the satisfaction of a job done. That is the feeling we’ve traded for these plastic annual reviews. We’ve traded the ‘stent in the snowstorm’ for the ‘spreadsheet in the boardroom.’

We need to stop asking for permission to be excellent. If your organization insists on the 3.7, give them the 3.7 of your effort, but keep the 7.0 of your soul for yourself. Build the things that matter. Help the people who need it. Collaborate not because it looks good on a slide deck, but because it’s the only way to do anything worth doing. The ‘calibration committee’ can take your 7 percent raise, but they can’t take the skills you built or the relationships you forged while they were busy arguing over where to put the decimal point on your life.

I walked out of that review 17 minutes ago. My manager thinks I’m disappointed because I didn’t get the ‘Exceeds’ label. He’s wrong. I’m disappointed because I spent 12 months caring about a system that was never designed to care back. I’m sitting in my car now, looking at the clock-it’s 16:47. I’m going to drive home, and I’m going to delete the 7 different drafts of my ‘career development plan’ that I wrote to please the HR gods. Tomorrow, I’m going to work for the people I respect and the problems I want to solve. I’m going to be like Blake M. The equipment will be delivered. The work will be done.

But the rating? The rating is just a ghost in the machine, and I’m done being haunted by it. If they want a 3.7, I’ll give them a 3.7 on paper, but my actual impact will be something they don’t have a column for. We are not percentages. We are not distributions. We are the 107 percent of the energy that actually keeps the world spinning, even while the bureaucrats try to slow us down with their charts.