Quantification

I've always defined myself with numbers.

It makes sense though. I'm an engineer by study (although I like to think that I'm designer at heart) and numbers have always come easily to me. I'm naturally predisposed for quantification. In general, our minds also wrap around numbers more easily than around descriptive statements. Quantitative is just easier to comprehend than qualitative: easier to explain to others, easier to scale, easier to prove progress.

And that's why investors and grants all want quantified evidence of progress. However, just because something is quantifiable, doesn't mean it's a valuable measure of success. Often, great opportunities and ideas are passed up because they're difficult to quantify. Take education. Out of all US Foreign Aid, only about 3% goes towards improving education (USAID 2012 Performance Report), while arguably, an educated population could be the best path towards change. Unfortunately, educational progress isn't easily quantifiable. You can't assign a number to how a teacher inspires students or how a student suddenly adopts a new interest in art. Instead, educational progress is reflected in the personal anecdotes of teachers and students seeing the transformational, unquantifiable changes happening day to day. When you start looking for numerical evidence in education, you create a dependence on test scores, standardization, and percent increases rather than what's really important.

The same goes for companies. By solely looking at the profit margins since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo, you'd say the last two years of her leadership have been a flop. However, looking beyond shows that she has rebuilt the foundations of the company and rebranded it from a search engine to a mobile pioneer. This has been a huge time and resource investment, but an internal overhaul that will change the company's trajectory forever. Maybe these changes aren't showing results yet, but it's unfair to say the work has been useless. However, that's the conclusion a lot of people are coming to because there are not yet many outward-facing successes.

Thus, quantification deters risk-taking. When you're looking to impress with annual progress and big numbers, you're going to go for easily achievable results rather than the transformational changes that take much longer to implement. Which is why when I noticed my own dependence on numbers, it was clear that I needed to change. In high school, my number was my GPA. I became obsessed with achieving the highest score possible because that's how I measured my worth. I made short-sighted decisions in order to fulfill my quantifiable definition of success. 

Recently, my number has been my weight. Instead of asking myself if I feel like I look good, I'm reliant on a measurement to tell me how to feel. In addition, quantifiable goals often become moving targets, and setting these unreachable standards has become way too common. It's why people can't escape the hamster wheel of finance. It's difficult to reach a point of having "enough" if enough is never defined and ever-changing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort to not quantify everything, and to look through a qualitative lens instead.  Quantifying limits the ways in which we can view ourselves. It's on us to be conscious of quantification and make our own decisions for when and where it is valuable to have numbers in our lives.