Cycling our new “daily” loop the other day, an entire blog evolved in my head. (It’s that or a single song that pumps along with the peddles—I try to remember to chant, but often other things seem to happen on their own.) The loop runs to Geyserville on a tiny back road (actually Highway 128) and then back on a larger local road. 18 miles or so. Quite a bit of composing time—so my next “tool” is a recording device.
Here is my attempt to recreate the original—more thoughts on our proclivity to measure ourselves, which often means to rate ourselves against others (or even ourselves on another day). Why do we do this? So we can award ourselves with feeling good? Or punish ourselves by feeling bad? “We’re better than that” or “Look how truly sucky we are.”
The Trap
The first thing to notice is that the process itself is a trap. You are trapping yourself into a particular measurement of success. If you can measure it, it has limited scope. It’s about a simplistic measurable element of the whole: the weight, the time, the revenue, the count of customers. It is inherently not the whole thing—only a minor reflection of one element of what you are doing.
Now these measurable elements (the revenue, for example) are useful measures in their limited niche—used for precisely what they mean, but no more. They can be used to measure our skill level (how well we sell) or single facets of complex behaviors and their results. Since we learned to measure things we have used that information to evolve. This is good, useful, and challenging. Especially when we really know who we are—then careful measurement of our progress on our path can be a useful tool. But we need to remember, that the things we can measure are not usually the whole story—there are things in our lives, important things, that cannot be measured, but must be experienced and evaluated through our subjective experience.
Missing The Updraft
Last May, when I walked up (it is always up) the trail into Macchu Picchu, I really experienced how I could screw up my moment to moment life by comparing myself to others—even inadvertently.
The walking trail into Macchu Picchu is very difficult for regular folks: up over three passes, 14, 13, and 12,000 ft, with some radical descents in between. If you are lucky you’ve spent a few days in Cusco at 10,000 feet, which helps because the trail starts at 8,000. You are walking with several hundred other people scattered on the trail—the government controls the daily total—some of whom are locals (porters and guides) and do this every day. We never seriously compare ourselves to them—we can grant ourselves that leeway. But my experience was that almost every other person on the trail was stronger than I was. And walked faster than I ever do. Sometimes, it seems they walked faster than I can imagine.
As people would pass me I would find myself picking up some of their speed, unconsciously trying to keep up. I would subtly measure the difference in our speed, and my lack of capability was hard for my ego to absorb, and it would try to “pick up the pace.” Then, if I happened to walk by someone going slower that myself (a very rare occurance), I would “pick up the pace” suddenly feeling good about being stronger than someone else. Every time I walked faster I got into trouble—I would have to stop and catch my breath and recover.
What’s the problem? The problem is that when I did this I was not running my own race; I was not working with my own capacities; I was defining the challenge using someone else’s game plan. In the old fable of the hare and tortoise, it wasn’t the tortoise’s slowness that brought success, but that the tortoise executed its own game plan, ran its own race. This is how we get the most from ourselves and our organizations. And we can’t do anything more than to maximize our own capacities in the moment. So I could never walk up that mountain any faster than my capacities last May; that was all I had to work with. And to maximize my success, I had to walk my own speed, execute my own plan which acknowledged my capabilities, talents, skills, and motivations.
Choosing Our Own Manuevers
This means that we have to maneuver in our own updraft. The maneuvers we choose must be our own. They cannot be adopted from someone else—they are in a different updraft, with different skills, knowledge, and capacities. Adopting someone else’s maneuver can be a recipe for disaster—like walking too fast for your heart. Or using a particular flight plan that is working for “those guys over there” when in reality they are in a different air current than you are, not to mention that they are in a different aircraft.
The skill of getting stronger and more successful is always about knowing your own capacities and working your own plan—never about measuring yourself against someone else.