52. How should we measure progress?
I flew to Boston last night. Time from take off to touch down was less than 40 minutes. Getting there by car is a three-and-a-half-hour trip. It would take you a few days (~28 hours of actual movement) on horseback. As a measure of progress, the human race is >40x more efficient (on this measure) than it was one hundred and fifty years ago. Next time you’re thinking about the speed of the wireless Internet on the plane, just think about that one for a second.
Speaking of Internet on a plane, I also had the random thought yesterday that I was curious whether headphones as a product category has been growing meaningfully with smartphone proliferation. I went to Google Trends. Voila, I had my answer. A hundred years ago if you wanted a comprehensive understanding of how a product category was trending globally it would have taken you months of research. If you could have gathered the information at all.
Life expectancy for the average human is now 70. It was 34 in 1915.[1] A species that has existed on this planet for 200,000 years has become 2.0x more durable in the most recent 0.05% of that existence.
Yet a lot feels unchanged. Progress seems stunted on many levels. This is not an attempt to identify each of the many places where progress is too slow, non-existent or reversing. It is also not an attempt to provide solutions.
Thinking about how to measure success, however, can often be a good way of helping you achieve it. This is one reason that businesses track their “Key Performance Indicators” and “Objectives and Key Results” so carefully. It is also related to why Boards of Directors focus so carefully on making sure that a management team has selected and is tracking the right metrics. False positives can derail progress quickly.
How quickly we can move around our planet, how easily we can access knowledge, how long we live. These are all measures of progress. They don’t feel comprehensive though. They fall short in some way for some meaningful group of the global population.
As I’ve done a few times in this daily writing exercise, I have to cut this one short, as I’m running out of time and really don’t have an answer to this question. I leave it instead as a question for ongoing consideration.
Note to reader: This is day 52 of 92 in my commitment to write for 30 minutes each day from October 1 through the end of 2015. Previous posts can be found here.
