One Apple A Dy #790 - how do I feel now?
ou know or can know so much about yourself.
You can measure your performances, check your heart rate anytime, get every possible health check, ask experts and know everything about your body and your health.
You can play memory and logic games, do intelligence tests, assess your personality, your behaviours or your emotional state, discover your learning style and learn everything about yourself, your abilities and traits.
You can know almost everything about yourself.
But do you ever ask yourself "How do I feel now?"
I'm a motorsport nut. In the last years, I've read many stories of tensions between the riders or drivers and their engineers. While the formers talk about feelings, the latter rely only on the numbers. When feelings and numbers go in different directions, tensions and conflicts arise. Unfortunately, because numbers are objective and easier to rationalise and explain, too often, they trump human feelings and sensations, even when results are poor.
In a way, we are trapped in the idea that if it can't be measured, it's not worth our attention. That famous quote from Peter Drucker, "what gets measured gets managed", unfortunately, expanded beyond business and in all aspects of life.
Ironically, Drucker never said that. And more ironically, those words are the first part of a sentence with which the journalist Simon Caulkin summarised a paper published by V. F. Ridgway in 1956.
"What gets measured gets managed — even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so."
Some things can't be measured, yet they really matter.
The challenge is to accept to know a little less and begin to feel a bit more every day. Just asking a simple question like "how do I feel now?"