I spent weeks working on a piece of software that accomplished something I’d never done before. On a precise schedule, it would pick up a file from one semi-aged computer system, translate it into something an even older system could use, grab some more information, and push all of that into a third, newer system.
Everything worked flawlessly, right up until the point that we officially went live on the system.
My Fort Knox of code turned into a seeming house of cards that came crashing down. Nothing worked the way it did during testing.
I haven’t resolved the issue fully yet. Somewhere, buried in thousands of lines of code, is something that regularly stops the whole operation in its tracks.
Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. There’s a manual import process that can be used to get around the issue until I figure out what’s going on.
From a progress standpoint, it’s interesting how just before things toppled, I felt like I had made tremendous progress. Now that things aren’t working, there’s a sense that I never made any progress at all.
Of course, that’s not true.
In the flow of time, the future becomes the present and the present the past quite literally with each passing microsecond. In the passage of time, we have a tendency to over-inflate the importance of what just happened and place too much value on what’s in the future. That’s why so many wellness and mindfulness coaches try to teach the principle of being present.
It’s hard to stomach, but even when life-altering events take place, we have an opportunity to dwell on them, endlessly, forgetting that we are capable of moving forward, or learning from them and moving forward as best we can given our new set of circumstances. Our experiences don’t define us. What we learn from them (or not) does.
Eve Arnold is one of my favorite writers on Medium. She recently completed a year of major life overhaul which included spending considerable time rehabilitating an old house she’d moved into. In a moment of reflection on being more present and measuring progress differently, she wrote:
I want to live more in the moment. I want to enjoy this bowl of porridge, I want to taste the golden syrup, the oats, the creaminess of the milk.
I want to bake bread but pay attention. I want to repot my plants with focus and care. I want to enjoy the experience, not just rush through it to tick it off my list.
I don’t want my life to become one big, endless, to-do list.
Reading that prompted thoughts I had about how I define progress and success. Lately, I spend most of my waking hours working, and I spend far too many hours awake each day.
I had a day in the last week where I arrived at my office at 3:15 am to work on solving a problem that is only about 10% my making.
Why?
Why would I do that to myself?
Why am I so loyal to an employer?
If I’m being honest, I have a hero complex. I derive a lot of personal satisfaction from being able to solve difficult-to-solve problems.
I sacrifice a lot for that.
Too much.
And measuring progress toward resolution isn’t easy. Will it take five days or five weeks?
As a general rule, businesses — particularly large ones — are not primarily focused on improving the lives of all their employees. Most businesses exist to make money, and an outsize share of that money is funneled to a relatively small number of people within the organization. As a result, measuring progress in a business often looks very different from measuring progress in life. Additionally, and importantly, there is no one-size-fits-all metric for measuring progress.
For example, let’s suppose two students attend the same university to earn a degree in cyber security. Student #1 comes from a family where there is adequate money that they don’t have to work to put themself through school. Student #2, however, is required to work a full-time job to be able to afford their education.
Given their circumstances, you can’t predict whether one student will outperform the other. Either student or both may do well in the program. When done, either or both may attribute their success or failure in the program to their life circumstances.
So, how do we measure progress?
Here’s the thing: progress is rarely linear and it’s not easy to quantify. Progress is often more about the journey than where we end up. If you set out to be able to squat 400 pounds and only make it to 375 before the risk of injury is too great, are you a failure?
Of course not. Today, I can’t squat 150 pounds (in addition to my own bodyweight), so achieving 250 pounds would be a massive improvement for me.
The real value of progress isn’t in the perfection of outcomes but in the effort we put into it.
What we often overlook or forget is that setbacks — like the ones in my software project — are not the opposite of progress, they’re an essential part of it.
Measuring progress needs to be less about metrics and milestones and more about the depth of our experience. It’s about the lessons we take with us, no matter how winding the path might be.
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