When stats become more important than goals…

Written by Raj H.

Slippery Road. Photo by Raj H.

This happens in schools, workplaces, and personal lives.

         We go to school for learning. And we have exams and marks and grades to evaluate our progress of learning . As we go on with schooling, grades become more important. We almost forget that our goal here is learning. We want to do anything to get that good-looking grade. Some even stoop to immoral acts to get that desired grade.

      It’s the same at most of our workplaces. Our corporate people create procedures for customer satisfaction and revenue generation, and they  set up certain stats (Key Performance Indicators – KPI) for evaluation. They become so obsessed with the stats that they don’t really care if our customers are happy or if we are generating revenue. What they all care about is if the KPIs look the way they wanted.

And we, in our personal lives, set goals and choose paths for our happiness and fulfillment. We tend to get so obsessed with our plan that we get worked up when things don’t happen the way we planned. We fritter away our energy trying to find the answer “why” something has happened, and we totally ignore what is in front of us. We even forget what we really want in our lives.

If we learn to step back and look at the big picture, and if we try to remind ourselves what we really want, our lives become simpler, more meaningful, and achieving our goals becomes easier.