It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.

One of the things I always liked about running is your ability is pretty easy to quantify. If you think you can run a 20 minute 5K, you can just go out and time yourself. There are other factors, but you can know where you stand through a simple test. Delusion about your running ability can get dealt with pretty quickly.

Yeah, sure, running is one dimensional - a monotonous, physical activity. Other facets of your life are far less so. They are messier, harder to quantify, and deal in a lot more subjectivity. But are things worth trying to quantify? Yes, absolutely.

Over a decade ago, I got interested in the Quantified Self movement. Eventually I got burned out on it - after all, it is also an industry - about selling you sensors, cloud services, and subscriptions. I think it still stands to measure yourself for the things that are important to you. Sure, your health is important. But this isn’t really about step counts and sleep scores.

The Stopwatch Doesn’t Lie

Back to running for a second. The beautiful thing about a stopwatch is that it doesn’t care about your excuses. It doesn’t care that you were tired, that the weather was bad, that you had a rough week. It just tells you how fast you went. And you can either accept the number or go out and change it.

Most of life doesn’t hand you a stopwatch. Nobody is timing your career progression or scoring your relationships. And so it becomes very easy to tell yourself a story. You’re doing great. Things are on track. You’re about where you should be. Maybe you are. But how would you know?

I think people avoid measuring themselves in the areas that matter most because the results might be uncomfortable. It’s one thing to find out you’re slower than you thought over 5K. It’s another thing entirely to take an honest look at how you spend your time, what you’ve actually accomplished in a year, or whether the work you’re doing is moving you somewhere you want to go.

What’s Worth Measuring

Things you don’t take seriously, sure, don’t bother to quantify them. But the things you do? The way you spend your waking hours? Your livelihood? You most certainly should.

For me, the things worth measuring have changed over the years. In my twenties, it was about output. How many projects could I ship? How much could I learn? How many problems could I solve in a day? That wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it was incomplete.

Now I think more about direction. Am I spending my time on things that compound? Am I getting better at the things I care about, or just staying busy? There’s a massive difference between activity and progress, and it’s easy to confuse the two, especially when you’re working hard. Hard work feels like it should count for something. Often it does. But not always.

A simple exercise: look at how you spent the last month. Not how you think you spent it - how you actually spent it. Most people are surprised, and not in a good way. The gap between how we think we spend our time and how we actually spend it is enormous. It’s the same gap between thinking you can run a 20 minute 5K and actually running one.

The Cost of Not Knowing

The real danger isn’t in measuring yourself and finding out you’re behind. The real danger is in never measuring at all. Because without some kind of honest accounting, you’re navigating by feel. And feelings are unreliable instruments.

I’ve seen this in myself and in others. You go years without really checking in on the fundamentals, and then one day something forces a reckoning. A job disappears. A project fails. A relationship ends. And you realize you haven’t been paying attention to the warning signs because you weren’t looking for them.

Goethe’s quote cuts both ways. It’s an error to overestimate yourself, sure. But it’s equally an error to underestimate yourself - to not know what you’re capable of because you’ve never seriously tested it. Both errors come from the same place: a failure to look honestly at where you are.

Keep It Simple

I’m not advocating for spreadsheets and dashboards for every aspect of your life. That’s where the Quantified Self movement lost me the first time around. It turned self-knowledge into a data engineering problem, and the tools became the point.

What I am advocating for is periodic, honest self-assessment. In the areas that matter to you, ask yourself some hard questions and don’t accept the first comfortable answer that comes to mind. Write things down. Compare where you are to where you said you’d be. Talk to people who will be straight with you.

The runner who never times themselves can always believe they’re fast. That might feel nice, but it’s not useful. And at some point, probably at the worst possible time, reality will hand them a stopwatch whether they want one or not.