Last updated on 2019/10/01
Yesterday was frustrating. We attended a competition that one of our kids was participating in and the end results of that did not go as we expected. At the end of the day I think the parents were more frustrated by the outcome than the kids were. And it all came down to a scoring, or measurement system that some faceless people (faceless to us) compiled somewhere else and that led to results that we did not agree with.
Think about that for a second. This type of measurement happens ALL THE TIME. Your daily life is a result of these hidden measurements. The speed limit that you drive is a result of someone measuring and stating a result that is estimated to be safe for that section of road. At work it happens all the time. Statements of “you are doing a good job” are a form of hidden measurement. The bad thing about this type of hidden measurement is that it can be influenced by human factors. The person doing the measuring might be having a bad day, or might have spilled their coffee right before taking the measurement. In business some other deal might have fallen through right before or someone could have seen an amazing and uplifting movie the night before and be feeling extra good about life when filling out the rating sheet.
What about observational measuring? I wear a fitbit and am constantly checking steps and data from that little device. Data definitely scratches an itch for me as an Engineer. I love seeing reams of data and charts and graphs. I love to try and pull trends and causation from data. What about this blog? I am eagerly wanting to start making the blog more public. Linking it to my LinkedIn, setting up a twitter feed for new posts, exploring and learning about SEO to get more organic visibility. But when should I do this? At what point is there enough (good) content here to make that worthwhile? At what point am I ready for someone else’s measurement of what is on here?
Maybe I am not meeting my own internal measurements here. To be honest, I really just wanted to vent about the perceived bad scoring from yesterday and to float my ideas for when I start attempting to get more visibility on this blog in the wider world. If this was hitting my own expectation then I would wrap all of this up in a nice, neat single argument and point here at the end of the post, something that made a solid argument for an idea and answered the question for how to achieve it. This post feels half-formed and will be something I hope I can look back on in the future and do a much better job of writing a clear and concise post with some pithy wisdom at the end even if the basis for the post is a rant about some random topic.
So can I try and make a point here? Well, I am identifying why this isn’t the best post and learning from that for later. I am scratching the surface on a few topics that very much interest me – data and perception. I am calling myself regarding my own expectations for quality on a post. Maybe there is some growth that can be found in this post after all. While I definitely wouldn’t put this up against some of the posts that I am really proud of, I am meeting my goals of writing more and getting better at expressing myself and maybe, just maybe, a few random posts every now and then are simply needed to work through some ideas and keep the ball rolling. That is my conclusion and I am sticking to it!
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