Measuring Up
October 4, 2017 – I heard a quiz result on the radio a few weeks ago and it stuck on me. The quiz was something like, “The average woman does this 19 times before getting married” and the answer was, “Kisses 19 different men.” How quaint, huh?
This daily radio quiz is usually open-ended questions like the one above that are pretty tough to guess because they are so wide open. But this particular question stuck in my head for a couple of reasons. First, the question sure supposes a lot about “the average woman” – assumptions about her getting married and her partner preference. She’ll marry once and only once. She’ll only kiss and marry men. And she’ll shop around, kissing 19 dudes first. No comment on how many she might have sex with. Where’s that sensitive little tidbit in the on-the-air quiz world? (We’ll get to my thoughts on that in a few paragraphs…)
I find a connection between that radio quiz and an online posting I came upon a few weeks ago. It was written by an older woman who listed “Things Time Has Taught Me.” I enjoyed the list and thought I’d eventually maybe write about some of the ten items she listed. The tie-in to today’s blog post is that one of the items on her list was “Most of our life is spent chasing false goals and worshipping false ideals. The day you realize that is the day you really start to live.”
As a young person, one must have goals or one spends one’s days virtually treading water and not making progress. I’m not sure how you tag one goal as “false” as in the online list and another as “making progress”, though. Is your life wasted if you choose to completely live in the moment instead of fighting to get ahead and move up? Are goals and self-improvement bad things? Well, heck no!
Living in the moment might translate as complete freedom to do as you like at any time: ignore social norms, spend resources foolishly without consideration, learn what you like, help others as you like, help yourself as you like.
I think that there are plenty of people, however, who others might call ambition-less, who just do the best they can, day-to-day, trying to stay in the same place, just trying to survive. They’re not focused on getting ahead, they’re focused on Maslow’s hierarchy’s lowest level: food, water, warmth, rest. Maybe second level: security and safety. And that’s it. The whole focus of their lives. I’m trying to project myself into my trashman’s life, the neighborhood landscaper’s life, the restaurant dishwasher’s life and consider, do they all want to be the next level up? Wouldn’t they each like to be promoted? To the trash truck driver, the landscape crew foreman, the sous chef?
Do they have the luxury of thinking that way – upward – or are they just trying to survive and put food in their stomachs and look after their families?
Next, I consider my friends at my old workplace. We were evaluated and competed for a finite number of promotions like many workplaces. If an employee didn’t make it to their personal goal grade level, was their career a waste of decades? One friend of mine considered that not getting promoted to a certain level meant she was a failure – regardless of the insignificant monetary bump that came with the promotion – and the fact that no one wore their grade level on their sleeve so it was pretty much unknowable to the rest of the workforce. It was her knowing that caused her anguish. Her self-evaluation. Maybe some coworkers would know about that grade level reached – by seeing the different colored parking hangtag or finding a promotion list lying around. But without others knowing, without that few paltry extra dollars, without reaching that certain grade level, she considered her career would be a failure. I think my friend completely overlooked the nice sum total of money earned over those decades – at that next level down where she considered herself stuck. She ignored the friendships forged across hundreds or thousands of daily interactions, the extra education she was paid to acquire, the nice salary that provided a comfortable life for her family and the significant successes she garnered during that decades-long career. She still considers herself a failure for not achieving that final promotion.
So what’s with this need to self-evaluate, measure up and have goals? Which goals are false and which are about creating good progress? Is it about measuring yourself against others (relative success) or measuring your own happiness (absolute success)?
Early in my career, I was pretty happy with my salary and level of responsibility and daily challenge. As time passed, in order to be where I felt I should be, grade-wise, I measured myself against my coworkers – in three ways. Intellect, ability to get along, and desire for work-life balance. I thought some were lacking intellect compared to me (okay, stupid). Or were a little nuts (crazy/rude/mean). Or there were those who spent inordinate amounts of time at work and never went home. Those had out-of-balance worklives. I think I’m pretty smart so it bothered me when someone who I thought was a simpleton was promoted ahead or above me. It also bothered me when a crazy person who couldn’t get along with coworkers was promoted at all. However, if someone I thought was stupid or couldn’t get along wanted to take a horrible job that no one else wanted, or they wanted to take a job that kept them from doing anything else in their lives, so be it, and congratulations on the promotion! Just shows that you really are stupid or crazy so I’ll just try to ignore you. Many of our highest levels of management turned out to be these people. Isn’t that something? I’m describing the highest levels of leadership as the lower intellect or hard to get along with because they willingly took those jobs that no one else wanted. They didn’t seem to care about having horrible jobs or losing their work-life balance. Of course there were those who were driven to the highest levels of management for selfless, altruistic reasons. And I was happiest working for them – if they were smart, communicative leaders and appreciated a decent work-life balance. There were plenty of high-level jobs that paid well, were challenging, and yet fun – with a decent chance for maintaining some work-life balance. Those were the jobs worth competing for! Considering all that, I did pretty well across the years.
Back to the radio quiz. It’s about the measuring up that is NOT in the workplace. How about measuring ourselves against others in those areas we don’t talk about? Do you get worried about measuring up in society, your neighborhood, with friends? I do. Or I did. Maybe I worry about it less, now that I’ve got a few years on me. But I’m really not confident enough in all areas of life to think I’m doing it right, regardless of what “it” might be. Am I cooking dinner at home enough nights each week? Do I take too many vacations each year? (Never!) Do we do enough charity work? Do you have too many cats? Do we own too many cars? Is our fashion up-to-date? (Ha!) Is our house too small? Too big? Is it decorated okay?
The trickier measures we don’t talk about or think or write about much: are we having sex too often? Not often enough? Have I (or you) had too many sexual partners? Too few? What might I be missing out on in life? Do I have it so good I should shut up and be happy or even gloat (to myself in a pleasant, quiet way)?
What’s this drive to measure ourselves? Is this measuring against others a kind of competition? Is it more natural to some people than others? Are the sportsmen and sportswomen among us different because they enjoy the competition even if they lose? Is the drive to measure ourselves in general related to some competitive drive that some of us have and others do not? Is it human nature for some (or most)? Or does the measuring yourself against others fall into the realm of “overthinking” and we should really focus on living, being happy and just getting along?
For me the need to measure has definitely diminished with some chronological maturity. (As opposed to personal and behavioral maturity which I won’t pretend to have achieved!) Nowadays, in my life, it is now much easier to just do what feels right and to heck with what others think. Simply one of the benefits of passing years. So, my young friends, try not to measure yourself against someone else’s norms. Who’s to say what’s a norm, anyway? As long as it’s not illegal and doesn’t hurt someone else (or yourself) do what feels right. You were raised right, weren’t you? Focus on integrity and treating others well and it doesn’t matter if you have 5 designer purses or none – or if you drive a beater car or a fine German-engineered marvel. Focus on leading a good life.
It sounds easy to say, doesn’t it? Then I find myself in yoga class, looking around, thinking, oh, do I have the straightest, best triangle pose? Is my warrior two pose the deepest and best? “Stop it!”, I yell silently to myself, “Reset, dammit! The only person you’re supposed to be competing with is yourself! If anyone!”
In yoga, the instructor will very commonly ask you to “set your intention” at the beginning of the session. I’m pretty sure no one (and that includes me) sets their intention to “do better than everyone else.” Yoga isn’t a competition. I attend yoga class so I can loosen up my back, improve my balance and flexibility, and relax. Not really anything you can measure. Yet the competitor in me can’t help looking around and comparing. Sheesh!
I can’t complete the NY Times crossword puzzle in pencil much less ink, I’m not a chess master, but I did pretty darn well on my SATs and GREs. So what? Do those things help me be a better person? I do like (need?) external validation (please say this outfit looks nice, please say the food I made tastes good, please say I made the right decision on whatever, because I don’t trust myself to know these things – yuck!). I can say we all have our strengths and weaknesses. We’re all allowed to have and to celebrate our strengths and weaknesses. I don’t need to be the bestest and mostest anymore. No one needs to be the best at everything. I had a horrible boss at one time who seemed driven to prove he was the smartest person in the room – any room – full of people – on every topic. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. And he was a horrible boss and horrible at getting along with people because he had this low-self-esteem-driven-need to be the most, best, smartest, etc. It was awful for pretty much everyone who worked for him who couldn’t bring themselves to just laugh at his antics.
Let someone else be the “best” sometimes. It’s kind of fun when you get into it. You can actually take joy in someone else being better than you at stuff. It’s okay. I wish I could draw and paint better. I wish I were a better photographer. But I have friends who can draw and paint and take photographs beautifully so I celebrate their talents and take joy in their wonderful skills!
I look around at the Arts and Crafts Shows where we sell our work. I measure myself up against the other ceramic artists. I rationalize why that dude can throw taller than me (oh, he’s a full-time potter), or has more beautiful glazes (oh, she’s been doing glaze chemistry for 30 years), or has more creative ideas for decorating (maybe, but I’m make much better forms). In my mind, I decide for the customers from whom they should make their purchases! Even before the show opens! I used to do this when husband and I played doubles volleyball on the beach. I’d see the other couples warming up and I would size up their capabilities. Ostensibly for discovering their weaknesses but really I’d be measuring us against them. Typically, during these analyses I’d decide we were better than our competition. And, typically, we’d LOSE to those whom I’d decided we were BETTER than. Nice. Why did that happen? Well, hubbie or I would choke at some important point in a game, get grumpy, or we’d be less consistent than our opposition, or we’d get tired sooner or something, anything. The pre-evaluating of our opponents set expectations that we rarely met. Our sand volleyball doubles career definitely didn’t achieve greatness! In fact, we both did better at doubles with other partners! Insert pouty face here. (We did, however, do just fine playing volleyball on the same sixes team over many years. Less choking (each other?) and less grumpiness since there were more teammates. It was on those sixes teams that we had the most fun.)
I have no idea if I would continue that sizing-up-the-opponent habit these many years later, long after we left the sand courts. Have I achieved some level of maturity that obviates that measuring against an opponent before the game even begins? As I think about it, these days I don’t participate in any athletic events that result in a “winner” anymore anyway, though I didn’t leave competition behind deliberately. Injuries took me out of the game, so to speak.
But I still like to win at board games!
Back to annual evaluations and the workplace for a minute. We used to joke at work when confronted with annual evaluations where everyone in the whole organization got a good rating – that we were all “above average.” Well, aren’t we? Who’s average? Do you know anyone to whom you’d assign an IQ of only 100? [Sidebar – from Wikipedia: Historically, IQ is a score obtained by dividing a person’s mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person’s chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction is multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score. When current IQ tests were developed, the median raw score of the norming sample is defined as IQ 100 …approximately two-thirds of the population scores are between IQ 85 and IQ 115. About 5 percent of the population scores above 125, and 5 percent below 75.”]
I firmly believe there are different types of intelligence, that’s for sure. In 1983 an American developmental psychologist, Howard Gardener, described 9 types of intelligence: Naturalist (nature smart), Musical (sound smart), Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart), Existential (life smart), Interpersonal (people smart), Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart), Linguistic (word smart), Intra-personal (self smart), Spatial (picture smart). I love this notion. I’ve thought about it ever since I served on a NOAA survey ship for a month and worked with people who were extremely good at their jobs but probably hadn’t made it past high school graduation. Their jobs didn’t seem to involve pure intellectual strength (reasoning) but more spatial smarts or naturalist It also occurs to me that professional athletes (bodily-kinesthetic smart) deserve huge salaries because they have a rare genius in their sport. Even 30 plus years after Gardener’s book came out, there is still a debate whether talents other than math and language are indeed types of intelligence or just skills. But I think some folks are just plain better at getting along (call it EQ for Emotional Intelligence, if you must) than others. They’ve got the interpersonal people smarts.
We did have a little room on our annual evaluation forms for “how” you did your assigned tasks for the year. Were you a good teammate? Were you honest? Did you communicate well? Were you a good leader? A rater had a tough job, you can imagine, because they could measure much more about GETTING the assigned tasks done than HOW they were done.
So let’s wrap up measuring and evaluating. I confess, I like to measure things. My dad was an engineer. Trained, educated, through and through. And he loved to measure things. He wrote the date on the packages of almost everything he bought, from cookies to epoxy. My husband and I are educated as scientists so we like to measure things, too. If you don’t know it’s 80° outside, how are you going to know that your favorite temperature is 80°? If you don’t notice that those potato chips have a “best if used by date” of a year ago, you’ll be surprised when you take a bite of a very stale chip.
And measuring (counting) from there to the radio quiz… does it really matter how many men a woman kisses before she gets married? Is she a late bloomer? Or loose? Holy cow, what actually even counts as a kiss?
You could go crazy with all this measuring, counting, self-evaluating, and annual reviewing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Walden, when he writes about leaving the woods because he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one,” goes on to say, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary…and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.” A few pages later he gets to the familiar part: “Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Chris Staley (Ceramic Art professor at Penn State, PSU Laureate 2012-2013, and my teacher at Penland School in June 2007), is online in a video about liking mistakes and not worrying so much about perfection: “…life becomes about a sea of measuring and quantifying, … evaluating ourselves” and enduring “annual reviews…Life is so much more than being evaluated in some way, validating ourselves. Life is about emotions and feelings and how we can connect with one another.”
I like it.
