The human brain was made for comparing. It wasn’t made to understand absolutes. Whenever we evaluate and judge something, it’s always by comparing it to something else. Is this big? Is this small? It’s hard for us to say. But if we are given 2 things and asked, “which one is bigger?”, it’s very easy to give an answer.
“Wait a sec”, you say. “You’re completely wrong. We can say that a whale is big without comparing. And we can say that an ant is small without comparisons either.”
That’s not really true. We are actually still comparing. We’re comparing their size to ourselves.
And it turns out that for most people, this subconscious logic is what drives how they see the world. They compare things, achievements and events to themselves.
It’s very hard to compare your thoughts and mindset with others because you can’t really read peoples’ minds. It then becomes much easier to compare achievements, things that you can actually see.
But then, it’s very hard to compare your thoughts and mindset with others because you can’t really read peoples’ minds. It then becomes much easier to compare achievements, things that you can actually see. And so, instead of assessing how smart people are, you instead assess how many As they have. Its not wrong, but just a little bit simplistic.
The problem happens when everyone starts to do it. And when everyone does it, it then becomes the accepted culture to judge people based on achievements. Which I’ll mention again isn’t necessarily wrong. But it’s simplistic.
Why simplicity is bad in this context
Now normally, I’m the first one to say “Keep It Simple, Silly!”, because I believe strongly in the idea of keeping a message as simple as possible. But in this context, simplicity is bad because it doesn’t fulfill the original purpose of measuring those achievements in the first place.
“What’s the purpose of measurements“, you ask?
Well, one answer is the answer that you probably have in your head: to see what they deserve.
And it’s a reasonable answer. You measure because you want to reward people and give them the responsibilities that they deserve. And you can only do that if you know what their merits are. To grade their merits, you’d need to measure.
You need to measure, and using those measurements, you can then compare one person’s value to another numerically. It’s as fair a system as any, but it relies on you measuring the right things.
But there’s a second, deeper and more important reason for measuring. The purpose of measuring is to find what is going wrong and what is going right.
It’s a surprisingly tough task to do.
Let math abstract the situation for you, and you can find red flags by looking at a single number
When a product is being manufactured and brought to market, you can measure things such as production costs, time to manufacture and employee efficiency to give you a good view of what is going right and wrong without having to be on the ground every day. This is extremely important in larger operations where you can’t see everything at once. Instead, you let math abstract the situation for you (see how Math taught me to be abstract) and you can find red flags (problems) by looking at just one number.
So why do I say the simple approach doesn’t work here? Because giving one overall grade doesn’t tell you how** individual components** of the process are doing. You can measure time to manufacture very easily, but can you figure out what causes the delay? You’d need to have measurements for every individual component of manufacturing time to figure out which one is taking too long.
And if you can’t measure and assess how something is doing, it means you can’t fix it.
So we need to go deeper…
Why going deeper is tough
We need to go deeper, but the question is how? It’s pretty easy to give an overall score if something is good or not, but how do you break it down and identify **what exactly makes it **good (what you should measure) and how exactly that component is ****performing (how you should measure it)?
And it’s very important to figure out what you should measure. There are some horrible side effects when we start measuring the wrong things. We start blaming the wrong thing, and we also start to improve the wrong thing!
It is only when you know what to measure, that you can set a standard for yourself on what to achieve. Standards are what we work towards. It’s our definition of what is good and what is worth becoming.
What happens when you start having the wrong standards? What happens when you start measuring the wrong variables? This:
If you’re doing more, you’re happier, right?
Yeah, Calvin & Hobbes is an awesome comic strip. Mostly because it highlights the truth. We sometimes give ourselves extremely stupid standards to follow, and start defining our fun and our happiness in very weird ways.
You should define measurements using your standards (instead of the other way around)
And this is the third way that measurements are used (or rather, misused), to define our standards for us. Rather than having standards, and figuring out how to measure them afterwards,** we sometimes start measuring first, then use those measurements as our standards!!**
Don’t believe me? Check to see if you define your happiness in any of these ways:
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by the number of things you can do
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by the number of times you can do it
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by the number of friends you have
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by the number of events that you attend
Now, I’m not saying that any of those things in itself are bad or worthless, but you shouldn’t be valuing yourself based on the ***quantity ***of things you’ve done, but rather by their quality. Try to replace the above with:
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whether the things I do are important?
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how well I can do those important things?
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are the friends I have close? or are they just facebook friends?
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do the events I join make a noticeable improvement in my life?
When you start going for quality instead of quantity is when you start going for the right standards. But the tough part of this is to define what quality means to you. What standards do you hold yourself to? What is important in your life?
Measuring everything instead
Unfortunately though, many systems of measurement are flawed because they can’t figure out what exactly is worth measuring. When they don’t know what to measure, they fall back on measuring just what they see on the surface, or worse, they just measure everything.
This is horrible because you just start getting lost in the data. When you start measuring everything* in the hopes* that one of the measurements will work out, it means you’re not doing your job. Unfortunately, many people seem to hate Math for some weird reason. And when they hate and don’t know math, then it pretty much means that they can’t figure out what to measure.
Math is about figuring out what is worth measuring
After all, that’s what Math is. To be able to look at a problem and to extract from it the numerical values that describe the problem. Afterwards, you do some calculation and whatnot to get meaning out of the data, but nowadays, that can be handled by computers easily enough. Math is about figuring out what is worth measuring. And there are people in power who don’t understand math, and yet are trying to use math to improve their systems. Does anyone see a problem here?
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