Halt!
Why do you judge my tales by just their fancy-schmancy titles? I'm tugging on your visual creativity before we begin.
I pen this down today after heavily pondering on a turbulent thought, being of progress. In an era where everything is measured by KPIs, CPAs, and ROIs, I often can't help but feel like we are strongly consumed in getting fast instead of ever appreciating our process to the learnings. I mean, we don't even like to slow down to understand, or even explain what either of these terms are, to the ones that don't.
The more unsettling question is that, for the ones that do know, do they understand the essence of it? Like really grasp it?
Keys for the ones that don't know:
KPI: Key Performance Indicator
CPA: Cost Per Action
ROI: Return On Investment
Don't give up on this just yet, I'm getting to the crux in a line or two...So coming back to progress, what is the reliable measure of progress, and performance? Who measures & regulates it? What's the bar that it's being compared to?
What is your process to progress?
We live in a world with an ever-growing population, with better ideas brewing up every new millisecond. Now with the abundance of these, humanity has come to a point where being the best simply isn't enough.
We aim for being better than the best, quicker than quick, and sharper than the sharpest.
Continually racing at a speed that previously hasn't been attempted, or seen and measuring our performance against the others...are we setting ourselves up to consistent dissatisfaction with the speed of our individual performances?
Given that this race is the very reason as to why we are where we are, but as the speed-chasers, how do we justify this very track if it were to breed the next generation to be programmed to believe themselves to be perpetual underachievers?
What I am trying to suggest is that either we have mixed up judgments of our ROIs with the actual KPIs or maybe, just maybe we don't really comprehend what our real KPIs are. More importantly, what is the CPA in this case?
Shouldn't our KPIs revolve around the progress we make of how much better we are today than we were yesterday instead of trying to out-better the other? Why are self-strengths omitted while admiring someone else's?
Think about it, we appreciate a baby wholeheartedly when the first crawl is initiated, even if it is followed by an instant fall. Our spirits are filled with fullness when we witness the first bloom of a sow patiently cared for, sprout.
There are countless menial examples that I could list here, but I'll spare you, you restless creature and I won't get into them...instead, I'll take you directly to the point. A baby doesn't look at another to start walking. A plant doesn't heckle the others if they take longer to bloom.
They just do what's natural to their process.
We're only reminded by a faint realization, possibly once a year, whilst sat in the seat of an airplane of how far we have individually come in our journeys...for the rest of the year, we live by an active reservation to racing to achieve the ROIs; R's being the return made on our apparent "progress & performance."
So I candidly, ask of you today to start measuring your personal KPIs by each day and see how far you've come, bit by bit, and day by day.
Be proud of your progress...you're a transformation in the making!
If you're someone like me, who's unapologetically proud of her self-progress, then here is a little reminder to be kinder to the ones that have their KPIs all blurred out. Remind them to seek, and measure their true P's (process to their progress, and their whooping potential) in this silly little overused abbreviation.
With love, and lots of kindness,
Stories By Giggles