A potentially helpful strategy for learning to take note of our progress could be to find a better scale. Fortunately, better as it pertains to a scale used to measure our growth isn’t really about being able to detect smaller changes or collect more data. Better, when it comes to noticing how far we’ve come is about being sensitive to the right indicators.
Although broadening the scope of what we measure feels intuitive, enabling ourselves to notice (and be moved by) a wider pool of metrics does not necessarily mean we’re on the right track. Most often, being influenced by a scale capable of taking into account all of the likes, clicks, follows, dollars, and visits our efforts receive causes us to miss the forest for the trees. While virality, profitability, and similar indicators (often) consume the lion’s share of what we want to measure, they do not represent the totality of what we can or should be allowing to influence how we feel about the progress we’ve made. In developing tunnel vision for a small sect of potentially helpful (but likely destructive) metrics we trade our faulty scale not for a better version, but for a similarly ruinous variant.
Our goal isn’t to trade bad for worse, it’s to find (or make) a scale that takes into account helpful metrics. One that measures less, but helps us grow more. A better scale allows us to objectively see the areas of growth we actually are moved by as opposed to areas that consume our focus and derail our progress. In essence, a better scale refuses to take into account everything that could be measured and instead opts for what should be measured. Put simply, a better scale measures what matters and leaves the rest for the birds.