You Are What You Measure: Rethinking Metrics of Success

Phil Rosen

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Good morning. I hope you enjoyed the long weekend.

Everyone wants to find purpose in life but there’s not always an obvious way to make that happen.

Today we’re going over how to frame your time in a way that will make your friends wonder what happened to you and since when did you get so productive and awesome.

Ready, set….

Smart, curious people have smart, curious friends. Share this newsletter.

How to measure a life: Rethinking metrics of success

Various things could define your success, depending on what you do and what you choose to value. 

If you’re in college, grades can be as powerful a motivator as any. Plenty of students sacrifice sleep, play, and relationships for a GPA.

If you’re a salesperson, monthly sales could indicate how much money you make, which makes for a strong motivator.

These are metrics of success. They give you something to measure yourself against, and they are a way to gauge achievement. Picking what to measure determines what you achieve.

Too many metrics of success and you get stretched thin and progress slows across the board.

But focusing on too few means your success can become one-dimensional. You can excel at one specific thing, but then you may lack the range to pivot or adapt.

Still, the fewer the metrics you track, the higher the chance of meeting those goals because your scope is more narrow and specified.

Then again, if you have only a single metric of success, falling short can be devastating. Failure becomes all-encompassing because your identity is wrapped up in a single goal. 

Then it becomes far too easy for the words, “I failed at this one thing,” to become “I am a failure.” 

Measuring success can destroy you unless you diversify your metrics. 

The things you measure provide the most obvious ways to witness your own improvement (or failures), and they provide something to determine whether you’re optimizing your life (or not).

Diversifying these metrics as if they were an investment portfolio can protect you from having too many eggs in one basket, as well as provide multiple avenues to make progress in life.

To figure out what you want to measure, derive one metric from each of these three domains:

1. Work/school
2. Personal curiosity
3. Passion

For work or school, pin down something that you do daily or weekly, then find a way to quantify it.

Placing an emphasis on progress rather than outcome is a well-tested way to find purpose in work, even if you’re doing something you don’t like. Determine which metric of success gives you the chance to treat work as a goal, rather than a means to an end.

To pick a metric for your personal curiosity, think about what you want to learn.

Maybe it’s skill-based, like a musical instrument or shooting a bow-and-arrow or become a more proficient chef.

Ask yourself what you are most curious to learn about, then make a list of two or three actionable steps you can quantify and repeat on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These are your metrics of success.

If you decide to become an expert on the Vietnam War, for example, your action steps could look something like:

1. Read 20 minutes a day of a history book.
2. Watch one history documentary per week.
3. Arrange one phone call per month with a history professor or expert.

The steps to create metrics of success for a passion are similar. Perhaps it’s painting or working with animal shelters or tutoring kids, or maybe something physical like distance running.

Once you pin it down, decide how you’ll measure your progress and what your action steps will look like.

Keep in mind for all of the above, if you fixate on something easy, you’ll work constantly to optimize something you already find easy, which isn’t productive.

By “diversifying” your metrics of success, you give yourself multiple outlets to find purpose and make progress.

Establishing three domains in which you can make progress in and measure success will, over time, create three distinct skill sets.

They will look different for each individual, depending on what you do and what you aspire to do. If you’re like me, they may overlap and prove complementary.

Here’s my three:

1. Work: news writing and reporting
2. Personal Curiosity: studying classic literature and fiction
3. Passion: writing fiction

You are what you measure, and also the things you don’t.

Make your time more meaningful and give yourself more ways to make progress by diversifying your metrics of success.

— Phil 

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Tip Jar Recs

1. Something quirky: Why King Tut is still fascinating so many centuries later. (The New Yorker)
2. Something different: Fifty years after directing The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola is working on a new $100 million bet. (GQ)
3. Something encouraging: The improbable effort to free the last orca in captivity. (Seattle Met)
4. New fiction from me: What is life if not the little moments that make up? A new short story by yours truly. (Read it here)

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