{"id":19029,"date":"2024-07-01T19:26:44","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T19:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestratefinders.com\/blog\/?p=19029"},"modified":"2024-07-01T21:02:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T21:02:31","slug":"be-careful-what-you-measure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestratefinders.com\/blog\/everything-else\/be-careful-what-you-measure\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Careful What You Measure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Wells Fargo fired a bunch of their remote employees.<\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out that these employees were \u201csimulating keyboard activity\u201d (with a program\/device that automatically typed keys or jiggled their mouse when they weren’t at their computer).<\/span><\/p>\n

Why?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Because that\u2019s how these employees were evaluated:<\/span><\/p>\n

Not by how many clients they brought in, nor how many relationships they fostered, but by how many hours they were active on their computers.<\/span><\/p>\n

So that\u2019s exactly what these employees gave them.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Remember, this is the same bank that told employees back in 2017: \u201cSign up as many clients to extra banking services as possible.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The result?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Millions of unknowing customers had credit cards and savings accounts and brokerage accounts created illegally in their names, hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and destroyed goodwill for Wells Fargo.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did both of these comically bad lapses in judgment happen?<\/span><\/p>\n

Bloomberg\u2019s<\/span> \u200b<\/span>Matt Levine<\/span>\u200b<\/span><\/a> said it well:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Two basic principles of management, and regulation, and life, are:<\/b><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You get what you measure. <\/span><\/li>\n
  2. The thing that you measure will get gamed.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Really that’s just one principle: You get what you measure, but only exactly what you measure. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the more general good thing that you thought you were approximately measuring.<\/span><\/p>\n

    If you want hard workers and measure hours worked, you\u2019ll get a lot of workers surfing the internet until midnight.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    I stumbled across this story last week, and immediately thought how this exact incentive-and-unexpected-results plays out everyday in our lives.<\/b><\/p>\n

    We download Duolingo to learn to converse <\/b>with a native speaker in their language. Months later, we\u2019re checking in daily so we don\u2019t get yelled at by the Owl, we are desperate to keep our daily streak active\u2026and we can only say \u201cI found a blue ostrich at the library.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    We lie in bed, waiving our arm above our head like a madman,<\/b> because our FitBit says we need 500 more steps to hit 10,000 for the day. (<\/span>\u200b<\/span>Here\u2019s the history of the 10k step rule<\/span>\u200b<\/span><\/a> by the way…)<\/span><\/p>\n

    I once \u201cmeditated\u201d every single day for 6 months<\/b> so that I could build my meditation streak in Headspace. Sometimes I would even open the app and just let the meditation play so I got credit for it, even though <\/span>I wasn\u2019t meditating\u2026<\/span><\/i>THE WHOLE REASON I HAD DOWNLOADED THE APP.<\/span><\/p>\n

    We tell ourselves that we want to \u201cread more,\u201d <\/b>but then we track how many books we read. This incentivizes us to read books quickly (without retaining any of it), instead of tackling bigger challenges like <\/span>War & Peace<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>rereading<\/span><\/i> our favorite books to glean more lessons.<\/span><\/p>\n

    WHY do we want to read more? To learn stuff or to be entertained! The<\/span> \u200b<\/span>number of books, or WHICH books, doesn\u2019t matter<\/span>\u200b<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    Social media began as a way to connect with friends.<\/b> These days, social media is big business and the<\/span> only <\/span><\/i>marketing tool for many creators. Because these companies track \u201ctime on app\u201d and \u201cattention\u201d\u2026social media is now a hellscape of outrage.<\/span><\/p>\n

    The most attention-grabbing content filters to the top: outrage inducing, factually incorrect, awful content designed to enrage and fear monger. Even most of my favorite wellness creators these days spend their time making reaction videos to the most vile wellness misinformation, because that\u2019s the only type of content that gains any traction.<\/span><\/p>\n

    (No wonder so many people are avoiding the<\/span><\/i> \u200b<\/span>Dark Forest of the Internet<\/span><\/i>\u200b<\/span><\/a>!).<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

    All of these things weave a fascinating tapestry of how the human brain works, and just how good our brains are at taking a metric and learning the <\/span>wrong<\/span><\/i> lesson from that metric!<\/span><\/p>\n

    What are you measuring?<\/b><\/h2>\n

    The majority of people visit NerdFitness.com to \u201close weight.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

    This is the one metric that everybody is used to tracking. Every ad talks about how to lose weight fast. They see the number on the scale and let that number determine how they feel about themselves that day.<\/span><\/p>\n

    This is the wrong metric to exclusively focus on:<\/b><\/p>\n

    We don\u2019t really want to \u201close weight.\u201d What we want is to lose fat while keeping the muscle we have (or building muscle).<\/span><\/p>\n

    If our ONLY goal is weight loss, severe calorie restriction and endless cardio might result in a lower number on the scale. BUT! If we don\u2019t change our relationship with food, and consume enough of the right macronutrients and micronutrients, we\u2019ll end up feeling lethargic, starved, and miserable\u2026and then gorge ourselves as soon as life gets in the way.<\/span><\/p>\n

    If we strength train while eating enough protein and in a caloric deficit, we\u2019ll actually lose weight <\/span>slower<\/span><\/i> than if we just starved ourselves and did hours of cardio. BUT, we\u2019ll be losing fat while maintaining muscle.<\/span><\/p>\n

    The scale should only be ONE part of how we<\/b> \u200b<\/span>evaluate our progress<\/b>\u200b<\/span><\/a>:<\/b><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    After all, the number on the scale is going to<\/b> \u200b<\/span>fluctuate from day to day<\/b>\u200b<\/span><\/a>:<\/b><\/p>\n