The Hardest Thing to Measure

The other day I linked to Maciej Cegłowski’s talk about success and remarkably it’s not filled with stuff like “just wake up earlier, you poor idiots” which so many self-help talks are really saying.

There’s a point in the talk I haven’t been able to stop thinking about though where Maciej says “if you just care about the money then it’s easy to measure success.” And I want to finish the sentence because something is just left hanging in the open air that I need to hold onto or say out loud and append to it: real success is the hardest thing to measure. There’s no metric you can point to and say “ah, yes! This is success!”