"What Does Winning Look Like?"
by John Wilder
"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. 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.
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 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. 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."
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