Something to think about for people ticking all the usual boxes but still feeling lost:

(there’s some build-up, but scout’s honour it’s worth it)

Back in my fervent self-help days, one of the soundbites I took to heart and pretty much tattooed to my forehead was:

What gets measured gets done

When I discovered this mantra, I was on one almighty health kick. So I began a routine of daily gym weigh-ins, noted down every rep of every exercise, logged every calorie in the MyFitnessPal app, monitored my sleep, tracked my BMI and took regular blood pressure readings.

I was hoping this was the answer to all my health goals.

But despite the apparent wisdom of that slogan, the tracking did diddly squat for my overall health and wellbeing. If anything, I could feel my anxiety levels going up.

Today, I think I know why.

The German economist Horst Siebert gave a warning on the dangers of metrics in his book Der Kobra-Effekt.

The way Horst tells the story is that during British colonial rule in India, officials wanted to reduce the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. So they offered locals a bounty for dead cobras. The scheme worked too. Day after day, the locals presented dead cobras to officials and were handed a few rupees in return.

Then something strange happened. 

The locals realised they could make more money by breeding cobras at home, killing them and collecting the reward. Of course, the officials found out about this and scrapped the bounty. But now the cobra breeders were stuck with a bunch of cobras they didn’t want.

End result?

The cobras were released into the wild and the cobra population ended up higher than before.

This little ditty reminds me of a similar story I read a couple of years ago.

This one went down in Jakarta in 2003.

In their infinite wisdom, the Indonesian government tried to reduce congestion by only letting vehicles with three or more people on the road. The idea was to encourage car-pooling and thus reduce the number of cars during rush hour.

Well, guess what happened?

Drivers began hiring “car jockeys” (basically people whose job was to stand by the roadside waiting to get into cars) so they could meet the three-person rule!

One more example:

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Weekend FT landed by the creaking oak drawbridge here at Fort Grundy. And over a black coffee and two boiled eggs, I flipped straight to the chess column, then the bridge column, then onto the book reviews.

One of the reviews was for a book called The Score which explores what happens when we try to rate our life experiences.

The reviewer gave the example of the elaborate scoring systems used by professional wine tasters. 

Turns out that to make their scores "objective”, wine critics taste wine without food. The logic being if you're pairing wine with different dishes, there's too much variability. One wine might be incredible with sausage & mash but mediocre with last night’s reheated lasagna.

I’m sure you see where this is going.

Because higher scores mean higher sales, winemakers started churning out so-called "fruit bombs". These are wines with big flavours which are great on their own, but don't pair well with food.

There’s now an entire industry of highly-rated wines that score brilliantly under test conditions but are actually WORSE at doing what most people use wine for (enjoying a tipple with a meal).

Plenty to chew on here for the corporate head honchos who live and work by the numbers.

But I’m more interested in the lessons for us mere humans.

It strikes me that anyone who sets themselves a target of 10,000 daily steps and then constantly checks their progress only to pace round the kitchen at 11.45pm to get those final 600 steps might just be confusing the measurement with the POINT of the measurement. Especially if they end up feeling all virtuous when they do hit those 10,000 steps or anxious if they don’t.

Perhaps you’re thinking “cheers for the anecdotes Tom, but this has nothing to do with me.”

That’s fair enough.

So let me bring this back to earth with a final example which is hugely relevant for anyone who cashes a paycheque each month:

In 2013, a paper was published in the journal Psychological Science. The paper reported on an experiment where participants worked to earn chocolate, then had limited time to eat what they’d earnt.

The key finding was that participants kept working to the point where they had more chocolate than they could or would want to eat. The paper called this “mindless accumulation”. It’s the idea that people work to accumulate rewards until they hit a wall, rather than stopping when they've earned what they need.

Put another way, once an output becomes a metric, the metric becomes the driver.

Lest you think otherwise, I’m not saying “money is bad”, “don’t ask for a pay rise” or anything like that.

In fact, I’m not making a point about money at all.

All I’m saying is it really pays to notice when your outputs have become the inputs. ESPECIALLY when there’s no villain in the story (like there was in the cobra and Jakarta examples), when no-one tries to game the rules and, just like the chocolate study, when the participants are doing it to themselves.

If you don’t notice when outputs have become inputs, the measure that was meant to guide you becomes a metric that runs you.

And that’s exactly why someone can be doing so well on paper yet still feel they’re heading in the wrong direction. 

Bottom line: 

If you feel stressed, uncertain or like you’re not on the right path, I’ll bet my bottom rupee you’re breeding your own cobras, innocently and accidentally.

Of course, there is another way to approach work and life.

A way that sits at the heart of my coaching.

If you’d like to find out what I recommend instead, I’d love to invite you onto a free one hour Discovery Call. 

No strings attached. Just a chance for you to explore and see a different way of moving through life.

If you’re curious:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

To fulfilment,

Tom