The Moment You Started Tracking It, It Started Lying to You

The moment you started tracking it, it started lying

to you Well, hello my friend.

This is the Daily Podcast.

My name's Jonathan Doyle.

I wanna ask you a question.

What are you tracking in your life?

Let's talk a little bit about numbers.

One of the key things to genuine personal growth, personal development, leadership,

growing businesses, growing anything that's significant to you, is getting

really, really good at the numbers.

It's that old saying, "You cannot manage what you cannot measure." So I wanna

introduce a little sort of paradox here that numbers are really important if

you wanna grow, but simultaneously, if the numbers become the thing themselves,

they can really lead you off track.

Does that sound a little cryptic?

So let me clear this up a little bit.

First thing, numbers matter.

My day is run by a whole bunch of significant numbers, but the central

thesis that I wanna introduce in this short message is that the purpose

of the numbers is the crucial thing.

The numbers that you measure in your life are not the point in

themselves, it's where those numbers are designed to be taking you.

So it might be weight, it might be, uh, time spent with

family, it might be nutrition.

There's a whole number of things we can definitely manage and measure, but

the problem becomes if we lock into the numbers purely and we lose track of

where they're supposed to be taking us.

I wanna give you some examples from history of how this plays out.

And before we get there, I just, I guess the way I started this, I wanna ask

you, are you, what are you tracking?

Because I can promise you, after more than 30 years speaking to

more than 600,000 people around the world in live events and many, many

conversations afterwards, that so few people are really tracking anything.

And I think to a degree it is true that you can't really manage and

change what's not even being measured, because how do you know if there's

been a significant movement either way?

So I really wanna put that idea in your head.

Numbers do matter.

If you wanna grow, if there's some area of your life that you do want

to improve, you've gotta start paying attention to the numbers.

But in this paradoxical episode, you don't want the numbers

themselves to be the pure thing.

Why?

Let's get back to history.

We're gonna talk about something called the Goodhart Law, or Goodhart's Law.

This is from the economist, a British economist called Charles Goodhart, and he

figured out that in every organization and for every self-improver, they eventually

discover that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Hear that again.

When the measure becomes a target itself, it's no longer useful as a measure.

So Goodhart gives an interesting example, uh, example from Soviet-era Russia.

Now, I don't know if you know this, but they used to have these five-year plans,

centralized control of the economy.

They'd send out these plans, and every factory would be regulated

and had to produce a certain number of whatever the X was, whatever

they were supposed to be producing.

And the example, the famous example from Goodhart was Soviet nail

factories So they were sent an order that they were to be judged by

the weight of nails they produced.

So they might say, you have to produce 50 kilos of nails by the end of the

month, or 100 kilos of nails, or 10 tons of nails, whatever the number was.

The people in the factory figured out that what you could do was just produce

a small number of very, very large nails.

Like you produce a 10-kilo nail, you can still say, "Hey, we hit the

100-ton target," but it just turns out that they're all made up of 10-kilo

nails that absolutely nobody can use.

So, and on the other side of this, this gets even more amusing, that if the, if

the factory was sent an order from Russian central economic control that they had

to produce a certain volume of nails, so you must produce 10,000 nails a month.

They just started producing tiny little nails that were utterly useless.

So you can see in that era that the minute they made the actual

measure the thing, it basically broke down in any way as being useful.

So are you with me?

Yeah, I don't wanna be, I don't wanna lose you here, but basically once you-- as soon

as you say, "Hey, the number is the thing.

The only thing that matters is the number, not what the number's supposed

to actually create, just the number," the whole thing tends to get a bit weird.

And the other great example, which was actually 100 years before Charles

Goodhart, was when the British had, still had colonial rule over India,

and the capital, Delhi, had huge problems with cobras, of all things.

So they put out a, an edict that they would pay for dead cobras.

So sure enough, cobras start to come in, very dead.

But the locals realized that if you bred cobras, you could start getting paid.

So people started breeding more and more cobras so they could hand

go and kill them and hand them in.

And then, of course, they figured out this was a problem, so they immediately

dropped the whole thing, and all of a sudden, lots of people had large numbers

of cobras that they could no longer sell, so they just released them on the…

I don't know if you're finding this funny.

I'm really enjoying myself in the studio.

So the measure, which was dead cobras, rather than helping with

the problem, as soon as it became the fixation point, it actually

created a much, much bigger problem.

So the message in both of these is that numbers, if they're pursued

purely for themselves, can eventually become less than useful to us.

So I remember when I was cycling a great deal, I, I, you know, I still do a huge

amount of fitness, as many of you know.

But for a long time, I was cycling at a very high level, and there's,

there was a kind of mystical goal in the cycling community.

It was, which was a 500K week.

You know, if you did 300Ks in a week, that was pretty standard back then for when,

what the kind of riding we were doing.

But if you did 500 kilometers in a week, people would notice on Strava, right?

They'd see your, your metrics on the Strava app and be

like, "Wow, it's a 500K week.

You know, it's a 500K week." And you're like, "Yeah, yeah." And a few

times I did that, and my memories are, I think once I did a 600K week,

and I remember being absolutely destroyed for about the next 10 days.

But What I'm trying to share with you is that the magical 500-kilometer number

just became a thing in its own right.

So it wasn't about whether it was making you fitter or faster or

happier, it was just a magical number that magically you chased.

So it became, the number itself became pretty useless in the great journey

of health and fitness and growth.

So that number became something that I became a slave to, and your

identity gets tied up in it all, "I must do 500 this week." And then

you'll get people on Strava that do, you know, 10,000 kilometers a

year is, like, a good benchmark.

So people would just chase that, regardless of whether they're getting

short-tempered with their families 'cause they can't sleep properly,

'cause their cortisol's too high, 'cause they're riding too much.

All these things kind of flow from it.

So really what I wanna bring you back to today is when we look at numbers in your

life, they've gotta be serving you, right?

They've gotta be serving you.

So let me take you through what that looks like for me.

Uh, I've learned in, more recently, I'm on a very, very strict training program,

which I absolutely love, and it was because I was at 90 kilos when I was power

lifting, and I'm, you know, I'm, I'm only 5'7", 5'8", so I was really bulking out.

And I w- I, you know, it was muscle mostly, but I couldn't fit anything.

So I set a goal to go back to my bench weight, which is about 75 kilos.

This is a 15-kilo weight drop.

So I built a very targeted program, and one of the things

I had to do for the first time was really dial in the nutrition.

So I had to, uh, do, sort of design macro targets every day, so protein,

carbohydrates, and fats had to be at a very specific level every single day.

And I've got a bunch of apps that help me with it, and it was the first time in my

life that I had to, uh, you know, measure, uh, calorie intake by weighing everything.

So literally, even today, even before I came in the studio, I weigh everything.

I have scales.

I eat very carefully.

The results are phenomenal.

I've never been in better shape in my life.

And I, listen, I'm not telling you to do this.

Very clear, this is not advice.

I'm just telling you that what I discovered was that if you want

extraordinary results, you've really gotta get good on the numbers, and

that's exactly what I did, is I started to get really good on the numbers.

And I've found that they've served me immensely.

But could you imagine if they were just abstract numbers that

I was chasing for no good reason?

The point of these numbers is that they are taking me to a

place that I'm trying to get to.

So my purpose is to get back to 75 kilos while keeping all the

muscle that I got out at 90 kilos.

That's quite a trade.

You gotta work pretty hard to get that right.

So these numbers have a very real purpose in my life.

You know, we have a lot of staff now, and so when I look at ROI

spreadsheets and things that I have to manage in the business,

it's like looking really carefully.

Are these numbers serving me?

Where are these numbers supposed to be taking me?

So now let's talk about you.

Are you tracking anything?

And if you are tracking anything, what is the purpose of that tracking?

Where is it designed to take you to?

So numbers can be enormously useful for you.

You know, number of hours spent with your kids if you wanna do that.

Like, I, I know some people say, "That sounds crazy.

That sounds extreme." I say, "Well, in this world, we're so busy, there's

so much happening, there's so much complexity that sometimes you gotta

be really deliberate and say, 'How much time am I giving to these people?

How much time am I giving to the people that I really love and care about?'"

And maybe you start to track that, but again, the purpose isn't to post

on your social feeds, "I spent 3.7 hours with my children this week,"

and virtue signal to everybody.

The purpose is, is that time, is that metric getting you closer to what you

want, which is a deep relationship with your children or your friends or

whatever number is relevant for you.

So that's the essential purpose of this.

I really wanna put two thoughts in your mind today.

Are you tracking anything?

Are you tracking anything?

So all I can tell you is that for me, every day numbers are significant.

I play golf, you know, probably four or five days a week, and I know that

sounds like I have the greatest life in history, but I play with my kids

and it's very structured and I do a huge amount of practice 'cause

I love the game and I love having something that pushes me to get better.

And so when I'm really working hard on my handicap, I'm tracking everything.

I'm out there tracking greens hit in regulation.

I'm tracking, uh, number of putts taken.

I'm taking, you know, tracking number of drives on fairway, all this sort of

stuff, and the purpose isn't some random interest in numbers for their own sake.

The purpose is because I wanna get better.

I love the game and I love the purity of it, and I wanna keep getting better at it.

So what are your numbers?

What are you tracking?

Are you tracking anything?

If you wanna change your weight, your health, your fitness, do you wanna--

maybe you wanna run a marathon, maybe you wanna run a half marathon,

maybe you just wanna run 5K, maybe you wanna walk around the block.

Maybe you're recovering from an injury or an illness.

And so those numbers, maybe you walked 10 steps today.

Maybe you walked 10 steps, and then you track it, and then

tomorrow you walk 20 steps.

But again, the purpose isn't to fall asleep going, "Oh, I did 20 today."

The purpose is, "I'm closer to that 5K.

I'm closer to being that healthy, vibrant, fit person that I really wanna be."

So make them-- Remember I said a couple of episodes ago, Plato's

great servant that, uh, Plato's great quote, that our emotions are wonderful

servants but terrible masters?

I always love that quote.

What about the idea that numbers are excellent servants but terrible

masters if they run our entire life?

So I hope that's useful to you.

I hope that's a blessing to you.

You can, uh, jump on Instagram and do a search for jaydoylespeaks, one

word, jaydoylespeaks, 'cause you will see me every single day doing

something involving some sort of insanity, usually involving numbers.

So come and say g'day on Instagram.

If you're on YouTube, give me a follow at jonathandoylespeaks, and everything

else is on the website, jonathandoyle.co.

For speaking engagements and, uh, executive coaching will be on

the website at jonathandoyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

You ready for the outro?

You ready for that one last thought to leave in your mind?

Here it comes.

Chase the thing, not the number that points at the thing.

The number will follow, and if it doesn't, it was the wrong number