We like keeping score. It tells us whether we are winning, improving or falling behind. Imagine watching tennis without knowing the score. A brilliant rally may still be enjoyable, but much of the meaning of the contest would disappear.
We do something similar with our lives. We create scoreboards, even when we don’t call them that. Salary, title, size of the house, investment portfolio, weight, steps walked, countries visited, followers and likes all give us ways of measuring progress.
There is nothing wrong with metrics. They give us direction and sometimes the discipline to keep going. The more interesting question is whether a metric we chose years ago is still measuring something that matters today.
When the Metric Outlives its Purpose
Early in a career, salary and promotion can be perfectly sensible measures of progress. They provide financial security, recognition and evidence that we are moving forward. But should they remain equally important twenty years later?
Perhaps “How far can I go?” has become “Am I doing work that matters to me?” Perhaps “How much can I earn?” has become “How much control do I have over my time?” The problem is not ambition. It is continuing to optimise for something long after its importance to us has changed.
Yet old scoreboards have a habit of surviving. We continue pursuing the next promotion, the larger number or another symbol of success partly because we have become accustomed to measuring ourselves that way. The metric can remain long after we have stopped asking what it was originally meant to measure.
When the Measure Becomes the Purpose
Health provides a simple example. Walking used to be something we did to get somewhere, enjoy the outdoors or simply feel better. Today, a perfectly pleasant walk can somehow feel inadequate because the watch says 7,800 steps instead of 10,000.
Steps, calories, pace, weight and BMI can all be useful. But strength, mobility, balance, energy and simply enjoying the walk may matter just as much. The problem begins when achieving the number becomes more important than the reason we started measuring it.
Leisure is not immune either. Travel has its own scoreboard: countries visited, attractions covered and photographs taken. But the number of countries tells us very little about what we experienced. Sometimes we become so busy recording a beautiful moment that we barely experience it. Social media takes this one step further by attaching numbers to the experience itself through likes, views and followers.
Without noticing it, experience can become evidence of experience.
What Matters is Not Always Measurable
Some of the things that matter most resist easy measurement. There is no dashboard for a good friendship, no quarterly score for whether your children enjoy talking to you or whether your partner feels heard. A promotion can be announced; peace of mind cannot. A larger house can be photographed; a sense of belonging cannot.
Perhaps this is one of the more subtle dangers of metrics. What can be counted begins to look more important than what cannot. The number feels objective, so we give it authority. Things that are harder to quantify can gradually receive less attention even when they matter more.
Organisations face the same problem. AI provides a contemporary example. If tomorrow’s manager leads ten people and twenty AI agents, will team size, hours worked or individual output still tell us much about managerial effectiveness? Perhaps effectiveness will depend increasingly on deciding what humans should do, what AI should do and where human judgement must prevail. When the nature of work changes, some of the measures used to judge it will have to change as well.
Our personal lives are no different, except nobody arrives to redesign the scorecard for us.
This does not mean constantly replacing old measures with fashionable new ones. Financial security matters. Health matters. Achievement and recognition may matter greatly. A metric does not become irrelevant simply because it is old, nor does a new one become meaningful because other people have started using it.
The question is more personal: Does this still measure what matters to me?
Perhaps salary needs to share the scoreboard with freedom over time. Perhaps steps need to make room for strength and mobility. Perhaps the number of countries visited matters less than how deeply we experience the next one. There is no universal replacement scoreboard, because that would merely exchange one borrowed measure for another.
We spend considerable time asking ourselves whether we are making progress. Every once in a while, it is worth examining the scoreboard itself.
You are still keeping score. But is the score you are keeping still relevant?
