Some people mistake performance with loyalty. It’s common in sport, for example, where players are good only for as long as they wear the right jersey. And it’s common in business, where employees get rewarded for tenure and compliance.

But while performance can be fluctuating over a period of time and in context, there is no correlation with loyalty.

One could actually argue that the capacity to be in different teams, to learn from different environments, to deliver under different circumstances, tends to increase and strengthen performance.

So, when mixing performance with loyalty, what we are really doing is judging the worth of our cause, of our principles, in a sense of our very own performance. It’s one of those cases where we let the decisions and opinions of others affect how we think we are doing.

And we should try to never let that happen.