What Does Winning Look Like?

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?

I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.”  His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention.  His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.”  The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:

  • GDP Growth
  • Price of Eggs
  • Stock Market Level

These are mainly material things.  The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.

Fun fact:  if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.

Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?

I’ll answer that question with another question:  Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?

I think that question is easy to answer:  we were happier then.

Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then.  Did we have a society based on greater trust?  Yes, yes we did.  Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).

Doors were unlocked.  Cars were unlocked.  The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.

There was also a greater presence.  People were where they were, mostly.  Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed.  People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.

If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme.  It’ll be lit.

And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input.  A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment.  A Xeet™?  It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.

We also thought differently.  When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away.  Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem.  It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.

There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.

There was also a greater patience.  The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”.  Yes.  That’s right.  A month and a half.  There was no next-day Prime™ delivery.  I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner.  The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.

Oh, sure, there were negatives, too.  I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone.  I’m pretty sure that polio sucked.  Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes).  And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden.  MKUltra, anyone?

And air conditioning.  I really like that.

But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.

Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze.  He called it air conditioning.

It hasn’t brought us together.  Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa.  The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.

It hasn’t made us stronger.  As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been.  Part of that is the wealth.  If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy.  A person who lives in a box?  They shrug at a thunderstorm.

Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?

Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle.  I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff.  I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.

So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.

My advice?  Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become.  You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

32 thoughts on “What Does Winning Look Like?”

  1. Great points. This is why I absolutely refuse to measure my waist.

  3. One of my first jobs was with a company that had jumped on Deming’s quality management bandwagon. We were measuring all sorts of crazy things to determine whether we were in fact, doing a good job. It was trivial stuff like the number of reports written, new teams formed, and so on.

    The irony of course, is that Deming clearly stated that a company should not use arbitrary measures as a proxy for quality as it will only lead to trouble. This is precisely what was happening. If number of reports was being measured, we would just submit shorter, but more frequent reports. Real quality was decreasing but we’d get a celebration lunch because we had gamed the system.

    My favorite was with one of our QC labs…..they were spending so much time in meetings trying to figure out what to measure as part of the QM program, that they weren’t getting their actual testing lab done. Samples were getting backlogged, soo management authorized overtime so they could continue the meetings and do the lab testing at night. it never occurred to the quality consultants that spending more money on overtime was already a major fail.

    Don’t get me started on ISO 9000.

    1. I recommended to the company I worked at 20 years ago to ignore it. I think they did. ISO 9000 is a scam.

  4. Information is too easy now and that makes it less valuable. In my senior year of college I did a term paper on the change in voting patterns in the South. I had to get a book down with the results for each election one after another, write down the results, double check what I wrote and then hand key them into a spreadsheet so I could make a graph. Now I just type in a search and the work is already done for me. The result of this is that we have people with access to the collected sum of mankind’s knowledge while sitting on the toilet but those same people are the least curious humans who have ever lived. I sure like having information at my finger tips but it definitely has some downside.

    1. I can still remember a surprising number of details from old school projects because I had to put forth the effort to find the information. Even the act of handwriting out class notes has been shown to significantly improve memory versus typed notes because it creates additional neural pathways in the brain. With most kids getting electronic notes these days, it’s a wonder they are remembering anything.

      You really do have to “work for it” for the brain to lock it in.

  5. The most valuable thing to measure in our 21st Century is not money but attention. Money can be printed in near-infinite quantities – and is. Value is measured in things like “viewer hours”.

    https://about.netflix.com/en/news/what-we-watched-the-first-half-of-2024

    “In the first half of 2024, people watched over 94 billion hours on Netflix — a reflection of how much our members love our stories and value our service”

    Think about that. The Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. The practical minimum wage is the $12 per hour I see on all of the fast food billboards begging for workers. That puts the value of measured attention at Netflix at $681 billion to $1.14 TRILLION for ONLY SIX MONTHS.

    That annualizes to $1.4 to $2.3 trillion per year in lost opportunity cost if these guys and gals had been working at home (or at the local Walmart or McD) doing something worthwhile instead of watching TV.

    Oh, wait, maybe they were doing both simultaneously…

    And that’s just Netflix. There’s also Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Hulu (ABC) Peacock (NBC), Paramount (CBS) and, er, porn…

    Meanwhile, 42 million workers (around a quarter of the American workforce) are paid $20 per hour or less for a total maximum fulltime 2000 hrs/yr annual nationwide payroll of 40M*20*2000= $1.6 trillion.

    https://www.epi.org/low-wage-workforce/

    Netflix alone wastes more in lost opportunity cost than a quarter of the American workforce.

    Meanwhile…

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/12/72-percent-of-us-high-school-teachers-say-cellphone-distraction-is-a-major-problem-in-the-classroom

    ***Ironic ending paragraph*** Final note: I’ve been watching Beast Games on YouTube (first two eps free to hook you) and Amazon Prime, billionaire Jimmy Donaldson’s real-life Squid Games. Well worth watching on several sociological levels to see what winning is all about. Check it out!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrBeast

    https://www.primevideo.com/region/eu/detail/Beast-Games/0TC47K49HUJK01R9FA42BAO22A

  6. John – – You said, “Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle.”

    Very wise observation. Kinda like the saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (probably is a corollary to Murphy’s Law)…

    I throw this one in for you and the other Wilder-ific readers: “Tolerance and Apathy are the last virtues of a Dying Society.” Aristotle

  7. Approaching 72 years on this orb, my observation is that what was the “Old High-Trust USA” died in January 1970, when forced integration of public schools was instituted. Due to my mother’s declining health at that time, I was off at military school for my senior year. Once I graduated and returned home in May, the stories I heard were horrid.

    On a lighter note, the “Ronco™” album made me remember a story told to me by a friend several years ago. There was a back cover ad on “Parade” that advertised an album for $2 by “The Original Artists”. He ordered, expecting songs sung by Jan & Dean, The Rolling Stones, etc.

    Guess what? He got 12 crappy two minute songs sung by a band named “The Original Artists”.

    1. If I ever form a band, we will be named “Free Beer”. Imagine the flyers and marquee sign!

      “Tonight, for one night and one night only, Free Beer!”

      1. Yep, but it will be a big crowd of very angry drunks once they learn they have to pay for the beer. Remember the scene from “The Blues Brothers”, where the crowd started throwing beer bottles at the band? Most venues don’t have chicken wire to hide behind.

        1. Didn’t Snoopy put on stage plays with “a cast of thousands”: Joe Thousand, Betty Thousand, …

  8. I liked it better when I measured time from the lower half instead of the upper half…or quarter. It does give me a better understanding of the importance of the things that should be concentrated on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give me as much time to do that.

  9. Speaking of measurement failures, consider cholesterol tests, and the tsunami of statin prescriptions that result. Why the obsession with measuring cholesterol (HDL/LDL) in the aggregate, rather than broken out into concerning (small, dense) and benign (fluffy) LDL? Because it’s cheap and easy. And why prescribe a statin to bring down the total cholesterol number by a few measly points when the difference in longevity, population-wide, amounts to a single day or two? Because it makes bank for prescribers and providers both.

    Reminds me of the drunk who goes searching for his dropped car keys under the streetlamp rather than in the dark alley where they fell because the lighting is better.

    1. Some detailed info on Statins that is generally not provided. I’m providing the info just because there are misconceptions about statins. Me, I take them. You, whatever you think best. I just want to make sure the info is available.

      The first study notes a reduction in all mortality of 11.9% over 5 years with statins. In absolute terms, the statins reduce the number of all-cause deaths by 1.8% (again over 5 years). The reduction is cumulative over additional years as reported in the report at the bottom.

      Benefits of Statins Over 5 years
      From: “MRC/BHF Heart Protection Study of cholesterol lowering with simvastatin in 20,536 high-risk individuals: a randomised placebo-controlled trial”, Heart Protection Study Collaborative Group, PMID: 12114036 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(02)09327-3
      Replacing the long-winded list from the journal with a clear table presentation.
      5 Year Incidents on Statins
      Findings Simvastatin Group Placebo Group Improvement
      All-cause mortality (%) 12.9% (1328/10,269) 14.7% (1507/10,267) 11.9%
      Coronary death rate (%) 5.7% (587/total) 6.9% (707/total) 17.0%
      Other vascular deaths (%) 1.90% 2.20% 13.6%
      Non-vascular deaths (%) 5.30% 5.60% 5.4%
      Non-fatal myocardial infarction or coronary death (%)
      8.70% 11.80% 26.3%
      Non-fatal or fatal stroke (%) 4.30% 5.70% 24.6%
      Coronary or non-coronary revascularization (%)
      9.10% 11.70% 22.2%
      Major vascular events (%) 19.80% 25.20% 21.4%

      BTW: Vitamin K2 mk 7 is just as effective at preventing cardio issues as statins. Plus it prevents osteoporosis. 50 to 100 mg per day is effective. 100mg upsets some people’s stomach. No info on combined the 2 meds.

      Effect is cumulative
      “Evaluation of Time to Benefit of Statins for the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Events in Adults Aged 50 to 75 Years”
      JAMA Intern Med. 2021;181(2):179-185. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.6084
      Published online November 16, 2020.

      2. All good data, but it ignores an interesting point. Statins are anti-inflammatory. The critical mechanism in artery blocking is, initially, inflammation. Inflammation, however, is deucedly hard to measure; total cholesterol is a breeze. After 40 + years in the ‘cholesterol’ business, I take a statin because it’s antiinflammatory….not because I want to reduce my total cholesterol to that of a newborn (which it does, by the way). The EFFECT on CHD is not really in doubt; the REASON for the effect is at least debatable.

  10. Technically, the GDP was half of today at the start of the Great Recession. So no, we weren’t happy as a group.
    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP/
    But you had to specify Real GDP just to tick me off about the depecitation of the dollar. Real GDP was half in 1996; the start of the 2nd Clinton admin. To have relected the blue-dress guy, we might have been happy, but stupid.

    At the time, I lived in SoCal. We locked doors diligently. Even so, we were broken into twice with another attempt interrupted. And the next door neighbor was robbed.

    I’m out of California, so I’m much happier.

  11. “If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme. It’ll be lit.”

    It is a non-zero likelihood that’s exactly how the SoCal fires got started.

  12. “…what gets measured, gets managed.”
    In the military, we used to say: “You can expect, what you inspect.”

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