How to make everything measurable?
Is it even possible?
(Image Source: HealthifyMe)
I have been thinking about this for a very long time and you will be second to none when I ask the following:
How do I measure success?
How do I measure achievement?
How do I measure results?
How do I measure outcomes?
How do I measure life?
As Professor Clay Christensen (Father of Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory), Harvard Business School said:
“The world is, in many ways, organized in a nested system. And so we have nations, within those we have industries; within industries we have corporations; within those we have business units; within those we have teams; within the teams we have people; and within people we have our brains. We are nested.”
It becomes extremely difficult when you are measuring yourself at a global or a macro scale compared to even measuring yourself at a micro level professionally. So let’s break this down in 2 blocks:
Macro-Level Measurement:
Being an enthusiast of Telecommunications and Networking technology for most of my professional life now, this example resonates well with me and hope with you as:
What kills successful companies is somebody comes in at the bottom of the market?Few years ago in telecommunications, Lucent and Nortel were the industry favorites who made circuit switching technology. Then came a fledgling company called Cisco Systems. Cisco’s Router technology, wasn't good enough to be used in voice, but they deployed it at the bottom of the market with data, and then went up market, and ultimately, killed Lucent and Nortel. The reason for that is Lucent/Nortel kept on making better and better circuit switch devices. What happened is all the individual people in a very successful organization did everything right, but because they did all of these things independently it summed up to disaster.
In Clay’s words - “The reason why it summed up to disaster is they were trying to maximize their profitability and typically, the way you calculate profitability: tomorrow's investments that pay off tomorrow go to the bottom line and are much more tangible than investment that pay off ten years from now.”
Micro-Level Measurement:
Imagine if I tell you that you have 30mins remaining in your life - What would you do? Instinctively and unconsciously, you'll allocate it to whatever activities in your life give you the most immediate evidence of achievement.
And our careers typically provide that immediate evidence of achievement - when we close a sale, when we ship a product, when we close a deal or when we get promoted. Our careers provide the most, very tangible, immediate achievement.
In contrast, investments in our families and personal life do not provide a sense of achievement immediately. Why do I feel guilty when I spend just 1 hour playing PS5? Why do I feel guilty when I spend more than an hour talking with my parents who are miles away & who I miss heavily? Why do I feel guilty in spending quality time with wife, kids and relatives on a day-to-day basis? The main reason is we are wired in a way where we think that achievement isn't at hand when we invest in relationships with our family, our children, and our spouses. And as a consequence, people like us who plan to have a happy life begin to get in a turmoil where our wired brains mix up professional sense of achievement as a source of personal sense of achievement without realizing that families and “me time” spent are truly the deepest source of happiness in our lives. And the secret is that we actually need to invest our time and energy in all of them, if we want to successfully measure our life growth at a personal level which is achievement in itself.
And to sum it up, the reason why successful companies fail is they invest in things that provide the most immediate and tangible evidence of achievement, and the reason why they have such a short time horizon is that they are run by people like you and I. We then apply that very same thinking process in our personal lives with sad results. So, don’t let your Macro-Life achievements wire your Micro-Life happiness!
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