Yardsticks matter

While I’m quick to highlight the importance of starting, we should be looking to define success early.

What does success look like? That’s a key question we need to ask ourselves while embarking on a project.

From here we can define what measures of success we will use. Should we benchmark ourselves against other performances, or is this unchartered territory?

What are we actually trying to achieve? Because if we chose the wrong yardsticks, we might end up achieving the wrong outcome.

The education system comes to mind. By having 2 hour written exams marked on the criteria of how well we articulated our recollection of previously taught material, are we teaching our kids to perform in life? Or are we teaching them the language to impress the markers?