How Are You Measuring Your Life?
How you measure your life directs your results.
We usually measure our lives in terms of the years we have lived in. By the months that have passed, and the months that are coming up. By this week, today, this morning, next Saturday afternoon… Then, to claim or foster efficiency, we attach as many valuable things to it as possible: The meetings to have done by the end of today, the projects to have completed by the end of the month, or the promotion, salary increase, or new course “to have ticked on” by the end of the year.
In this way, we pile up goals, objects, achievements, and ‘things to do’ day by day, following TIME, as our compass.
Nothing wrong with that. However, it seems to drive a sensation of having more-than-we-can-handle things to do lumped up in a year. Then, we draw a bottom line around December 20nish,…. to be ready to start again.
Time with Perspective
How could we enrich that view bringing more Perspective to life?
I am a fanatic of measuring my life by time, yet with a rich perspective. From an idea, I read from Tim Urban on his fantastic blog waitbutwhy.com. I now have on my computer (to look at it often enough) a little graph showing thousands of boxes (actually 90 lines X 52 columns of boxes) where I play to mark how many weeks are gone by and how many weeks are left… of my life. This assumes that I will make it until 90 years old. Indeed, I could die tomorrow, in 10 years, or go over 90 years, but that’s not ‘important’.
The ‘variance’ of how long you are going to live, doesn’t matter to the visual and emotional connection to the thought that my weeks are numbered; this current week I’m living, makes one week less to do what is meaningful: to do what I choose myself, that is important to me.
If life would be a wonderful high-resolution picture, you and I are now in a pixel of it. We live in a pixel of our entire life picture. Keeping that awareness makes you value and savor differently each little pixel :-)
But…in which other ways could we measure our lives?
Measuring by meaning
I don’t know from where I understood this idea, or if I dreamt it or just made it up myself:
What if we measure our life by how many love stories we had?
What if we measure our life by how many people we had helped?
In the Bible is said that we should use the time we are given on earth (what we call life) to create treasures that don’t get rust or moss. The idea is to spend our earthy efforts not on ‘perishable’ assets as objects or money, but on deeds and behaviors that will never perish, as loving and helping others live a better life. This way of thinking combines a sense of urgency for what to create during the time we have with our meaning of life.
Being ‘efficient’ on things that are not meaningful or fulfilling to you is … pointless?! Like trying to improve an obsolete system.
Clayton Christensen, who transformed the way of thinking about disruptive innovation and passed away in early 2020, said it concisely: Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
The compression of time is not a matter of compounding activities but the compounding of meaning.
Measuring life as “Distance to…” our meaning
- What if the daily question is Not How long will this take, but How far can I go?
- What if we look at how far I moved forward instead of looking at the 24hr that have passed, at the end of each day?
We could say, It took me 60 years to go from A to B, to do and have X, Y, Z… but maybe, with CLARITY in what you truly want in a lifetime, is possible to bend time in half and do it in 40 years, or in 10 years… Why not in 18 months?!.
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How to gain more clarity, perspective, and sense of meaning, then?
A simple and powerful way to understand if our direction is aligned with your meaning is to dial-in your sense of satisfaction with who you are and what you do. That will be your true Cause
To be truly satisfied, you need to perceive and believe what you do is great work. A unique way to do great work is to love what you do. If you didn’t find it yet, keep looking for it. Don’t settle. Keep looking for your Cause.
The concept of Hygiene factors
Hygiene conditions or practices keep healthy and prevent disease. It is specially used around personal hygiene and to mean cleanliness. It could also be used for sleep, as in sleeping hygiene. In conclusion, Hygiene factors are needed for a system to work, without them the entire system falls apart. However, confusing Hygiene factors with “The Purpose for” gets us off route.
For example, in a job, your salary is a hygiene factor. It needs to be right and should never be the Cause for you to being in that job.
Other hygiene factors could be money, status, compensation, and job security; they should be rather a by-product of being happy with a job and not the Cause of it.
I know… Cause and hygiene factors get mixed, it is a little of this and a bit of the other…however:
When we can distinguish what is Cause and what are hygiene factors, we can easily focus on the things that matter most to us, for the right reasons.
Putting it all together
Think about the metric by which you’d like your life to be judged. Find your true Cause measuring with that ‘stick’. Make a resolution to live every day with your cause and metric in mind so that your life will, at the end of the journey, be considered by you, a success.