I’ve been using the excellent Headspace meditation app over the past 3 months. Unlike my last tryst with the app 2 years ago when I repeatedly fell asleep (!), I feel things are going much better on the whole. However, I found myself wondering this morning as to whether I was making any real progress. As I did that, I stopped myself.
There are many metrics that are easy to measure – money, promotions, number of friends on Facebook etc., number of gym memberships – and, for every one of these, there are metrics that are hard to measure – success, impact, depth of relationships, fitness. I am reminded of Clay Christensen’s anecdote about parenting. While it was easy for him to measure success in his career, he found it very hard to gauge if he was doing well as a parent. It is only after his kids turned 20 that he finally felt satisfied that he’d done a good enough job. Even if there are many apps that make it easy to quantify aspects of life that were not quantifiable before, many of these ideas will continue to be hard to measure.
My experiences have taught me that the actions with metrics that are hardest to measure are often the most worthwhile. These are the sorts of investments you make in yourself and others which, for the longest time, don’t seem to have any impact you can see or feel.
Until they do..
A Learning a Day 