Measurable

If you’ve ever been employed at a firm or large company, you’re familiar with tracking your progress, making sure deliverables are in on time, or pulling any one of a variety of reports. As a matter of fact, this is something that you revisit daily, if not multiple times a day.

What’s the purpose for all this tracking and having a pulse on activities happening within the firm? It’s to make sure that goals are being accomplished and that everyone is contributing to meeting larger company goals.

If you’re trying to accomplish things in your own life, outside of your job, you want to move towards your own personal goals in the same way. Namely, by taking consistent action on tasks relevant and related to your goals, and of course, measuring your progress.

Measuring your progress is arguably the most important activity you can perform aside from taking action when it comes to reaching your goals. By having a reliable gauge of what’s being accomplished, you’ll always have a pulse on the effectiveness of your actions, and what sorts of adjustments are necessary to drive forward towards your goals.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MEASURABLE

According to the dictionary, to measure means:

To ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units or by comparing it with an object of known size.

OR

To estimate or assess the extent, quality, value, or effect of (something)

Both of these definitions imply that if something can be noticed, whether an effect, quantity, change, or phenomenon, then it can be measured. They also imply that there may be things we aren’t yet able to measure because we either don’t notice them or don’t have the sufficient technology, insight, or education to do so.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO HAVE MEASURABLE GOALS

When you set goals for yourself, take action, and fail to meet your goals, it’s most likely because you weren’t tracking your progress. You may have been taking consistent action, working hard, and working on relevant tasks. However, if you weren’t tracking how you were doing or you weren’t measuring your progress, how would you know when you’ve reached your goal?

On one hand, you may have been working for a significant amount of time and not made any progress. On the other hand, you may have been doing such a great job on something that you reached a milestone early. However, instead of moving forward to the next task towards accomplishing your goal, you overproduce in one area and underproduce or do not even start on the next task.

Imagine that you opened a bubble tea shop and you made an initial investment of $150,000. You took out a loan, borrowed some money from family and friends, and built out a storage space with all the required equipment.

First of all, if you don’t have goals for the shop and you’re just there to pass the time, your business will most likely not last very long or end up costing you a lot of money. However, if you have set goals that you’re working towards, you can measure and keep track of your sales. You’d have a clear gauge of how much you need to sell at given times to break even in six months.

If you’ve invested $150,000 and you want to break even in 6 months, after rent, cost of goods, wages, and insurance, you’d have to have at least profited $25,000 for the next 6 months to break even. If you wanted to break that down even further, and assuming you’re open 7 days a week, you’d have to profit about $893 a day to break even in 6 months.

With clear targets and timelines broken down into monthly, weekly, or even daily goals, there is no question as to what action needs to be taken. Your actions will be in alignment with your goals and you’ll always know the right direction to take.

KEEP YOU FOCUSED

Having measurable goals keeps you focused. You know what your running costs are and how much your profit is for each item. Of course, you’d want to make sure you sell as much as possible so that you can make your money back and turn a profit faster. Having a target and being able to measure your sales keeps you focused on the task at hand.

By being able to review your sales each day, you see which items are the most popular, what time of day the most sales are being made, you start to see trends over the course of weeks and months, and most importantly, you can make adjustments to how you’re running your operation to be more efficient, profitable, and enjoyable.  You’re able to clearly see the progress you’re making. This gives you clarity in regards to what needs to be accomplished and in what timeline.

In larger, more encompassing goals that have a lot of moving parts, measuring progress provides feedback and reassurance that the work being done is making a positive impact and moving you forward towards your goal.

Imagine if you didn’t have a goal of how much you wanted to sell each month. Each day, you go in and put in your time. if you make sales great, and if you don’t make sales, oh well. If someone asks you how your new shop is doing, you’d tell them, “I dunno.” That would not be a healthy place for you or your business to be in.

However, imagine if you’ve got sales goals or sales targets to reach monthly. The first few weeks are really busy as you’re learning and settling into the flow of everything. Then one day, after you’re in the flow of things, you take a look at your sales goals and see that you’re exceeding your targets! You feel so good and it just makes you want to keep improving the store and for you to push sales!

Having precise goals that are defined by measurable metrics such as time, money, or other quantifiable metrics keeps you focused. Distractions and unexpected events won’t throw you off course. Instead of being constantly reactive, having clearly defined and measurable goals allows you to be as proactive as possible. You set yourself up for success with measurable goals!

HOW DO YOU MAKE GOALS MEASURABLE?

To make a goal measurable, it should be able to be tracked with objective metrics, such as time, money, and other standardized units of measurement. Objective metrics are an important point because they are universally understood and accepted standards of measurement.

When it comes to your own personal goals regarding health, finances, or starting new habits, using objective metrics allows you to accurately track your progress. Take a weight loss goal for example. If you say that you want to lose weight with no further information, you’re bound to fail because there’s no timeline to lose the weight and no set amount of weight you’d like to lose.

However, if you say that you’d like to lose 10 pounds in the next 5 months, now you have a specific weight loss goal and a specific timeline that you’d like to accomplish this. You can easily track this on a monthly basis where you lose 2 pounds a month, or even on a bi-weekly basis where you lose a pound every two weeks. Having specific and measurable targets to meet along the way to accomplishing your goal makes it so much more engaging. Also, seeing your progress will make you want to continue taking action to move forward. It’s a positive feedback loop that gains more momentum with each go-around. To take the measurement even further you could track your caloric intake as well as calories burned from exercise to move forward towards your weight-loss goal faster. Once you see the benefits of measuring your progress, you’ll find it fun and exciting to keep yourself accountable for achieving your goals.

MEASURABLE GOALS KEEP YOU ACCOUNTABLE

Accountable?! Oh no, the dreaded “A” word!! Am I saying that you actually have to be responsible for doing something? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying! Being accountable to someone, even if it’s just yourself, helps to keep you on track.

There is no one that operates in a bubble, completely isolated from engaging with the rest of the world. As a matter of fact, anyone watching this is heavily engaged in the world. You watch programs on different platforms, explore things that interest you, and engage with others of similar interests. Either directly or indirectly, you interact with others.

Because of your engagement and interaction in the world, using objective metrics allows you to track your progress within a universally accepted framework. A second is a second regardless of whether you’re in Shenzhen, China, or New Orleans, Louisiana. A kilogram is a kilogram whether you’re in Bali, Indonesia or Paris, France.

This is important because building a habit of measuring yourself and your progress is actually building the habit of accomplishing goals. When you develop this capability over time, not only does your influence over yourself grow, but your influence and credibility with others build as well. As you repeatedly set measurable goals, track them, and accomplish them, you earn a priceless reward that no amount of money can buy; the confidence of knowing that you can create desired results!

MEASURABLE IN CONTEXTS

So far we’ve been talking about analytical measurements; having measurable goals and the importance of keeping targets quantifiable. We’ve also discussed the importance of using objective metrics with universally accepted standards of measurement.

Now, let’s go back to the second definition of measurement we mentioned at the beginning. That measuring could also mean estimating or assessing the extent, quality, value, or effect of something.  This is saying that instead of using numbers and quantities, measurement can be contextual as well.

For example, what if I asked you, how much you love your dog? You tell me that your dog is a part of your family and that you love your dog unconditionally because your dog loves you unconditionally. Would you love your dog any less if your dog always pees on your carpet? How about if your dog couldn’t contain its excitement and ended up biting your friend’s child in play?

Although you may not be able to put an exact number on how much you love your dog, you can look at the context of your experience with your dog and get a sense of how much you love him. Do you rush home from work every day to take him outside so he can pee and poop? Do you plan your schedule around making sure to get home in time to feed him? How much time do you spend every day taking him to the dog park so he can play? Do you take your dog to the groomers? How much money do you spend on him? Many couples have a dog before having kids. Is your dog as much a part of your family as your child? Do you love your dog like you love your children? Again, you may not be able to quantify the emotional love you feel for your dog. However, you can look at how much time and money you spend on his care to give you a contextual measurement of how much you love your dog.

MEASUREMENTS CAN ALSO BE EXPERIENTIAL

As we can see, context and actions taken in context can give you an accurate measurement of experiences. If your interactions and observations of a particular situation are positive, then your context forms a positive, safe, or desirable association with that experience. If those interactions and observations are negative, the context that forms around them is negative, dangerous, harmful, or something that should be avoided.

My favorite example of this is in horror movies where a bunch of teenagers sees the scariest, most dark, and eerie house you’ve ever seen and they decide, against all good judgment, to go in and explore. Obviously, the kids in the movie have never ever watched a horror film in their lives, otherwise, they’d know better than to walk into some abandoned haunted house where some crazy supernatural stuff is going to go down! If you saw a house like that, would your first instinct be to go exploring? Mine would be to get as far away from there as quickly as possible!

This reminds me of a saying, that youth is wasted on the young. What does that mean? In youth and early adulthood, you may not yet have had a wide breadth of life experiences. Because your scope is most likely limited to school, extracurricular activities, friends, and family life, you form your perspectives of life around those experiences.

However, in youth, there’s a vibrance, curiosity, vigor, fearlessness, and even recklessness that allows individuals to try new things, explore, fail, and get up and try again. As people get older, and they don’t have the right context to evaluate their experiences in adulthood, they tend to take more measured steps and be more averse to risk. If you look back on your life, could you imagine how different it would be if you had the right context to evaluate your experiences? Wouldn’t that curiosity, vigor, and fearlessness come in handy in a lot of situations in your life as an adult? For everyone, in their own way, I’m sure the answer is a resounding, “Of Course!”

This leads to the saying “If I could only go back to whatever age knowing what I know now…I would have blah blah blah.”

MEASURABILITY OF CONTEXT

Hindsight is a wicked tool. When you look back at events in your life, knowing what you know now, things that are so painfully obvious may have eluded you at an earlier time in your life. There are many correlations in regards to experiences that will give very accurate predictions on outcomes if you know what to look for.

For example, your grandfather was a doctor, and he always took your mom to the office with him. Your mom eventually became a doctor, and in turn, if your mother took you to the office as a child, the odds are pretty high that you will eventually follow in her footsteps and become a doctor as well. Constant exposure to the context of life as a medical professional colors your perspectives as to how life “should be” and that’s the way that life is going to be because that’s the only way that you’ve ever been exposed to.

Another example would be if you grew up in an abusive household. Your father or mother may have been physically or emotionally abusive as you were growing up. This being the context that you were constantly exposed to, you would naturally see this sort of behavior as normal, acceptable, and expected. So when you have a family, this is how you most likely will interact with them, if this is all you know. As the old adage goes, when you learn to interact with the world as a hammer, everyone else is a nail. When you grow up as a nail, you’re always looking for hammers.  

On the surface, these examples may seem to naturally happen in a very organic way. However, looking from the outside and understanding that there is a dynamic at work in regards to human behavior and developmental psychology, you can see that these outcomes could have been predicted with a high degree of probability. They ARE measurable.

MEASUREMENT IS NOT JUDGMENT

When there is education behind your observations, the contextual measurements of a situation can take on a whole new light. In the examples of the family of doctors and the family of abusive individuals, understanding how behaviors get replicated and repeated allows you to make a measurable prediction about what will most likely happen. As a matter of fact, FBI profilers utilize these measurable behaviors frequently in their work. By reverse-engineering these contextual measurements, FBI profilers are frequently able to find people with a high degree of accuracy.

Some may make a quick judgment to say that exposing a child to a stable profession is good and positive. Some may say that exposing a child to abuse is negative. However, the purpose of measurements is not for you to make a judgment on a situation. This is a really crucial point, so I’ll say it again. The purpose of taking a contextual measurement is not for you to make a judgment on the situation.

The contextual measurement is just an EVALUATION of a situation. The crucial point is to use that measurement, use that evaluation, and then take appropriate action towards creating an outcome that you desire!

In other words, how are you able to make a good decision if you’re not able to quantify or contextually measure the foundation, the basis, and the fundamental components of that decision? When forced to make a decision without focusing on fundamental, measurable components, people will most often fall back on emotions to make their decisions. Are they feeling good? Are they feeling bad? Whatever they’re feeling, that is what determines the course of action they take.

Emotions make people unreasonable. As a result, decisions made based on emotions will also be unreasonable. For example, if you’re out having drinks already acting sloppy because you’ve drank more than your limit, is it a good decision to drink more because you’re having a good time? Or, if you’re feeling sad because you just had a big argument with your significant other, are you going to skip work on the day that you have to give an important presentation to what could potentially be your company’s largest client? Do you only act when fear or anxiety kicks in because a deadline is a next day? Or can you take action, proactively, ahead of time because you know time is being measured and action was called for five days before the deadline?  What goal are you trying to achieve and how will this contextual measurement help you make a decision on the best course of action to move you forward?

At any given moment, you are working with a set of knowledge, context, and experience that you will base your contextual measurements on. Your perspectives and understanding of how the world works are determined by this set of knowledge. For the most part, you accept things as they are and don’t question whether things can be different or not.

There may come a time when you experience interaction or encounter a situation that you’ve never experienced before. At first, it almost doesn’t register because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced prior. The interaction may only have to happen once or depending on the type of impression or effect it had on you, it may have to occur multiple times. This new interaction eventually becomes a part of your knowledge and experience set and you then begin to incorporate this experience into your contextual measurements.

For example, let’s say you grew up in a small town where it’s common to share things. There is an understanding amongst everyone in your small town, that if someone shares something with you or does you a favor, you will share something or return the favor the next opportunity you get. Then one day, you move to a big city for school or a new job. You’re still operating on the knowledge set that you had when you were living back in the small town. You do nice things for people and share the things you have, but everyone ends up asking you to do things or borrow things and they either never give it back or never return the favor. Most of the time, they don’t even say thank you!

Of course, after this happens over and over again, you make a contextual measurement than a judgment using your knowledge set, that people in the city take advantage of people and they aren’t nice. Everyone is a selfish person and there isn’t a sense of community. Is this an accurate statement? Or would it be fairer to say that everyone has so much going on and has so much to do, that there isn’t time to slow down and focus on the aspect of connecting through human interaction?

It is transformative when you come to the realization that your experience and knowledge set can be expanded. It is also transformative when you can put new experiences into context to make positive choices based on fundamental measurable components instead of on emotions.

In the abusive family example, let’s imagine for a moment that you are that person who grew up in an abusive household. According to a study conducted in 2014 by Christopher Wildman, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University 12.5 percent of children have been the victim of at least one episode of abuse or neglect by age 18. It has been confirmed that children who have experienced abuse or neglect are statistically more susceptible to physical and mental health problems in adulthood. They also face higher suicide risks and run into trouble with the law.

Over the course of the first few years of your life, there may have been a tremendous amount of reinforcement that it is normal for parents to be abusive. You may have gone through years of living life and having interactions influenced by this filter. Then, events in your life drive you to want to learn more and understand why you act the way you do. As you become further educated about the patterns of behavior and how childhood experiences form a foundation for how you view the world, you start to gain a greater understanding of the drivers of your own behavior.

You become more conscientious about your behavior and recognize patterns that lead to undesirable results, results that go against the ideal vision you have for yourself.

Through becoming educated about the dynamics of how your childhood in an abusive household influences your behavior presently as an adult, is it enough to be aware of?

Is it enough to have developed the contextual measurement to recognize when you’re about to set in motion a series of actions that will produce undesirable results? Is it ok for you to know that you’ll very soon be predictably hurting yourself or someone you love?

No of course not right? And this is the difference between a measurement and a decision. Just because you can predict something is going to happen is not the same as taking action to prevent it from happening. Ask yourself, is this the result I want? Will this move me forward toward my goal? Make a decision and then take the appropriate action. You’ll be surprised at how effective you can become.

FOCUSING ON POSITIVE

You will most often hear about negative situations in the news, crimes, conflicts, pessimism, and fear. Consuming too much of it can actually be quite toxic. When it comes to contextual measurements, what is presented most is simply a measurement and evaluation of a situation.

Presenting a judgment or taking a stand is often seen as being biased. Moreover, if a stand is being taken, or a judgment is made on measurement, it’s too far removed to affect you in any personal way. When it comes to taking decisive action to move towards a more ideal result, this rarely ever happens.

Now that you have been made aware of contextual measurements and you start paying a little more attention throughout your day, you’ll observe measurements, and subsequently, decisions are being made almost constantly. As a matter of fact, it is estimated that adults make around 35,000 decisions a day.

The challenge now is to start producing positive actions utilizing your ability to measure, both analytically and contextually. In the family of doctors, one would imagine there were many conversations of a parent or grandparent explaining medical concepts to a child.

This does not have to be limited to conversations between family members, or topics on medicine. It could happen between anyone, and the topic could be about producing positive and desirable outcomes. Here again, measurement comes into play as there needs to be a connection and openness to listen and understand before successful communication and positive action can take place.

Given the landscape of how information is presented and consumed, and how it has colored the way people make measurements of their world, this is a daunting task. The change in your world must start somewhere. It might as well be with you!

CONCLUSION

We discussed why being able to measure progress is absolutely essential to accomplishing your goals. If you’re able to measure your actions, you set yourself up to effectively track your progress, make necessary adjustments, and have clarity on what it takes to accomplish your goals. In addition, you’ll know when you’ve reached your objective because you have clearly defined what metrics define success.

We discussed how using objective metrics and universally recognized standards in analytic measurement helps you navigate the path to success within the framework of the world you operate in.

We also delved into context, something that isn’t often discussed when referring to measurement. We discovered that contextual measurement is the basis of the actions we take and explored how in spite of our circumstances, greater education and greater context equips you to be proactive in creating the results you want.

Finally, we challenged you with a call to utilize your analytic and contextual measurement ability for the purpose of affecting positive change in yourself and the world.

Thank you for joining us on the Modern Wisdom Guide.