Why “vitals”?
Why measure heart rate when what really matters is winning the race? After all, vitals don’t prove you’re alive, they just say you’re not dead.
How do you measure success? In a perfect world, if you could measure anything, how would you measure your performance?
Often times, we can’t measure exactly the thing we want. Take this blog post for example: I’d like to know whether it makes a difference to anyone, if it helps them understand performance better. I don’t have access to the people reading this, let alone a way to read their minds and check, “Yep, they learned something!” If I had analytics running, I could check the number of pageviews, time spent on site, scroll distance, clicks, etc. But even then, none of that would tell me what I really want to know. At best, it would suggest “engagement”—but engagement is just a proxy. The simplest, most direct metric for what I really want to know is comments: people responding to the post and saying, “Hey, thanks for sharing! I never thought about that before. It was really helpful.” Another decent metric would be number of new subscribers. More people want to read, so I must be doing something good, right?
But are comments and new subscribers the best metrics for every blog? Maybe. Maybe not. They’re not “vital”, but they do tell me, for my blog, whether I’m actually doing a good job.
This is the art of performance: knowing how to define, measure, and improve what matters most to you and your business.
As I analyze the strategy of my business, I can pick apart the different actions I perform and the requirements that support it. Layer by layer, I can step down until I reach the core vitals—the fundamental qualities every business needs (at least in some degree) to survive: How do I teach people? They learn by reading my blog. How do they read my blog? The web page loads in their browser. If that web page doesn’t load, people don’t learn. And that’s that. It’s like breathing.
Vitals are a baseline. They’re fundamental. They’re something everybody needs. Whether your job is in sports, education, government, software, finance—it doesn’t matter—you’re dead if your heart stops pumping. You need to keep breathing… but that’s not what matters most.
Breathing may be vital, but it’s not your main job.
Keep an eye on your vitals, but focus on the real target: how well you provide value to people.
After all, it’s not the breathing that matters most. It’s what you do with it.
Why measure heart rate when what really matters is winning the race? After all, vitals don’t prove you’re alive, they just say you’re not dead.
How do you measure success? In a perfect world, if you could measure anything, how would you measure your performance?
Often times, we can’t measure exactly the thing we want. Take this blog post for example: I’d like to know whether it makes a difference to anyone, if it helps them understand performance better. I don’t have access to the people reading this, let alone a way to read their minds and check, “Yep, they learned something!” If I had analytics running, I could check the number of pageviews, time spent on site, scroll distance, clicks, etc. But even then, none of that would tell me what I really want to know. At best, it would suggest “engagement”—but engagement is just a proxy. The simplest, most direct metric for what I really want to know is comments: people responding to the post and saying, “Hey, thanks for sharing! I never thought about that before. It was really helpful.” Another decent metric would be number of new subscribers. More people want to read, so I must be doing something good, right?
But are comments and new subscribers the best metrics for every blog? Maybe. Maybe not. They’re not “vital”, but they do tell me, for my blog, whether I’m actually doing a good job.
This is the art of performance: knowing how to define, measure, and improve what matters most to you and your business.
As I analyze the strategy of my business, I can pick apart the different actions I perform and the requirements that support it. Layer by layer, I can step down until I reach the core vitals—the fundamental qualities every business needs (at least in some degree) to survive: How do I teach people? They learn by reading my blog. How do they read my blog? The web page loads in their browser. If that web page doesn’t load, people don’t learn. And that’s that. It’s like breathing.
Vitals are a baseline. They’re fundamental. They’re something everybody needs. Whether your job is in sports, education, government, software, finance—it doesn’t matter—you’re dead if your heart stops pumping. You need to keep breathing… but that’s not what matters most.
Breathing may be vital, but it’s not your main job.
Keep an eye on your vitals, but focus on the real target: how well you provide value to people.
After all, it’s not the breathing that matters most. It’s what you do with it.