Wound Up

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to represent. How a number is heard, interpreted, and felt, can wind us up. How they relate to ranking criteria or how we are judged. 

Key performance indicators to measure us. Seeing what you have done. Seeing what you haven’t done. How the environment has changed. Have you put sufficient effort in? 

Has effort resulted in output? How clever are you? Should you be given more responsibility? Should you be given coaching/mentoring/the boot? All the various ways we use to decide if someone is good enough. 

It is always interesting to see how this is connected to the broader questions, and the broader community. Many problems are solved in complex groups. Wealth creation is a team sport. Attributing who did what, and ranking those contributions, can be an impossible task. One that pretends that contribution = value = reward. 

If you look at the long-term growth of countries' “gross domestic product”, it exploded with the industrial revolution. Newtonesque jumping on the shoulders of giants. 

We tend to look at meritocracy as the marginal contribution of the individual (“if they hadn’t been there”) rather than the hard Tim Minchin truth that “If I didn't have you, someone else would do”. 

Accepting that we are inherently replaceable *in the world of money*. People will miss you, but someone else will do the job. Don’t get wound up the numbers. They don’t represent you.