Stop Measuring So Much
The ubiquitous tendency to measure just about every aspect of ourselves and our lives has significant downsides.
What I read: “The End of Grading” by KC Cole. Published February 9, 2023.
Throughout most of my life I’ve been obsessed with measuring things or worried about how I might be measured by others. School grades. Annual performance reviews. How much weight I can lift in the gym. What number of words I can write in a day. The list goes on for how I can concoct ways to measure my life or allow others to measure me.
Lately, I’ve begun to halt my lifelong dedication to measurement. I learn to learn, not get a grade. Even during the last years of my corporate life, I really didn’t care how management ranked me. When I exercise now, I go by feel, not number of sets or weight lifted. As I sit down to write each day, I don’t have a specific number of words in mind that will be staring back at me from the screen when I’m done.
I’ve mostly let go of measuring things or falling prey to the measurements of others. I still do find myself falling back into ill-advised measuring now and then, but much less than my former self did.
Using the annual March 14th Pi Day [https://nationaltoday.com/national-pi-day/] as a jumping off point, KC Cole explains why sometimes measuring things does a disservice to the essence of what it’s measuring.
But we’ve got pi all wrong. It’s not really a number at all. It’s a relationship—between the diameter of a circle and its circumference. Its richness only becomes irrational when shoehorned into ill-fitting numbers (think of Cinderella’s slipper), shattering its beauty and burying its meaning. Numbers aren’t pi’s native language. We shouldn’t be surprised that its essence gets lost in translation.
Most measurements are essentially comparisons. While in some cases measurements are vital, such as in science and research, when it comes to our own lives measuring can have many downsides.
Years ago, I wrote down a quotation attributed to an unnamed yoga teacher – “Comparison is the quickest road to suffering.” An even more famous quote is from Theodore Roosevelt – “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Both statements are true.
Any way you look at it, constantly comparing ourselves to others or to some arbitrary metric is folly if our goal is happiness and contentment. The big problem with measuring ourselves is that typically the bigger the number the “better” it seems we’re doing when in reality it just means we’ve achieved a bigger number. Yippee. That and a few bucks will get you a cup of coffee and not much else. The jolt of dopamine that accompanies achieving some next step measured goal usually lasts for only moments before we need to replace it with the next measurement we’re going to strive for.
While Cole initially launches their argument against measurement mania in which we’re all engulfed from the standpoint of grading students, it applies to all of life.
The very thing that’s been eating education is now devouring everything else. My doctor recently urged me to get an expensive diagnostic test because it “makes our numbers look good.” Her nurse asked me to rank my pain on a totem pole of emojis. Then after the visit, to rate my experience. The numbers are all irrational. And rather like the never-ending digits of pi, there seems to be no end to them.
When I read that paragraph, I had just completed a rating survey sent to me by my medical clinic to request my assessment of my latest doctor visit. I dutifully clicked off the tick boxes to rank and rate more than 20 areas of care and experience and when I was done I thought “Well, that was a waste of time.”
I found the crux of Cole’s article to be this.
Misunderstanding measurement misunderstands understanding itself. The ubiquitous, incessant surveying smothers knowledge with noise, drowns out the information we actually need for finding out how things work, what’s going on, what we’re doing, what actually matters.
Something I have long realized was an entirely useless exercise is the annual performance review that’s standard throughout most of corporate America. Although I had no choice but to do them during my time in corporate management, they always seemed like nothing more than a silly and fruitless exercise that did little to accurately assess an employee while doing quite a bit to demotivate them even when the review rating was good. Managers are often coached or guided to “find something that needs improvement” in every performance review and I defy anyone to come up with one that doesn’t land on an employee’s ear as a disheartening negative.
Outside of perhaps science (and Cole makes an argument that even then measurement isn’t always ideal), measurements by their nature defy the complexity of whatever they’re being charged with assessing.
Of course, we must measure some things. As imprecise and problem laden as it can be, measurement is sometimes necessary. But we should do so realizing its usefulness will range anywhere from a solid data point to entirely irrelevant. I contend much of what we measure in life falls squarely on the irrelevant side of the spectrum. Often, we should just not bother measuring a certain something at all and instead allow the qualitative rather than quantitative nature of it to exist as is.
Measurement must, at times, suffice as a substitute for understanding, but measurers must fess up to this fudging up-front.
Cole does a beautiful job of explaining throughout the article how questionable our cultural obsession with measurement can be. Since I’m approaching my 70th birthday, measuring age has been on my mind. Cole points out how silly that is too.
Years lived seems a silly measure of life. It compares life to nonlife, years lived to years not lived, and what, pray tell, is that? You can count the years between birth and death, but the years before and after spool off to infinity. Just like pi.
Cole concludes the article with “It’s not the numbers, stupid. What matters are relationships.” That sums up the core message of the article for me.
I recommend reading the article. I think the more we can eliminate measurement from our lives, the happier we’ll all be. I’ve reduced how much I measure things in my life. Maybe you can too, and if so, I hope it brings you the greater peace of mine it’s brought me.
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