Exciting announcement first: I’ve been cooking up something thrilling that I can’t wait to share with you all. It’s been a year in the making, and while I’m keeping the full details under wraps for just a little longer, here are two hints: It involves us meeting in person, and it’s happening November 1-3. Save the date on your calendar, and stay tuned!
Now, onto the regularly scheduled programming…
I recently took two road trips—one through Portugal’s countryside and the other across rural Oregon.
In Portugal, every turn revealed charming historic villages and vineyards that looked like they belonged in a painting.
In the US, the scenery was . . . well, a parade of strip malls. You know, those outdoor shopping centers with rows of chain stores surrounded by large parking lots.
If you’ve never seen one, it looks like this.
And if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They all look the same, regardless of where you are. There’s zero character, zero charm, zero beauty.
As we drove past one strip mall after another, I kept thinking to myself: How did we get here? Thousands of years of architectural progress, and we ended up with over 65,000 strip malls in the United States?
The strip mall is the product of a mindset that focuses exclusively on what you can measure—here, cost efficiency.
If you ask yourself, How do we squeeze as many dollars as possible from every inch of space at the lowest cost?, you end up with the strip mall.
There’s a famous saying attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.” But what gets measured doesn’t just get managed. What gets measured also gets all our attention. It becomes the thing, at the expense of what you can’t measure.
You can’t measure beauty in architecture.
You can’t quantify if you’re a better parent or a better colleague now than you were last year.
You can’t put a price on honesty, empathy, flexibility, or courage. This is why people call them “soft” skills—as if they aren’t real.
We assume only what can be quantified is real. And we neglect what can’t be measured.
So we end up with strip malls.
We rob people of their individuality and turn them into cogs in the machine.
We worship at the altar of productivity and tie our self-worth to how quickly we can clear our to-do lists or how many times we can reach inbox zero.
We track what’s easy to track—not what’s important—and falsely assume that if we hit these metrics, we’ve accomplished something valuable.
Be careful what you measure.
Because the most valuable things in life often don’t come with units of measurement.
