Big Frank has been thinking about the numbers lately. What numbers? Well - take any important aspect of your life: your friends, your job, your bank account, your free time, your hobbies, your love life, your exercise, your eating, your televsion watching, your shopping, your interests, your reading, your music, etc. etc. - all of them can be quantified. When you quantify them you learn something about them. This is actually one piece of advice that Atul Gawande gave in his book about how to improve medical treatment. He said that when you count something you will learn something - and he recommended that you count something that you are interested in. A recent This American Life radio program focussed directly on this issue also - in this particular episode, "Numbers" the show interviewed people who used numbers to quantify things that typically are not quantified. One woman quantified her love life over a 10 year span. A couple used numbers put into a kind of corporate report to quantify the emotional content of their lives (this one - they claim - didn't work). Still others used numbers to create art, to keep track of their daily lives, and one man used them to learn how to better market himself to his wife (this one actually improved their marriage). So the results are a mixed bag - but in many cases it works. We think of numbers as dry, but . . . they don't lie.So contrary to what my brother Dan said about the intuitive approach being the only way to respond to people's personalities, Big Frank thinks otherwise. We all know times when our intuition failed us - if we had numbers to back us up, and we paid attention to them, the mistakes might have been avoided. So as an experiment - go back to Big Frank's numerical system for evaluating personalities, and use it with your real time-tested friends. I think you'll find that they all score pretty high on it. Then when you meet someone new - score them out and this will tell you whether your intuition is working in your favor or not.
Then - find something else to count in your life (Big Frank is talking as much to himself as to all you readers). Find something that is important to you and then count it and keep counting it over a period of time. Then - if you are comfortable sharing - let Big Frank know what the result showed you.
Finally, Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "A Word on Statistics".
3 comments:
Your intuition fails you only because you have not spent enough time working on the inner self. Once you are connected to that source of understanding, the limitations of the mind will be perceived, including the limitations of making decisions based on "numbers". Count to ten, then try it!
So - the question then becomes: how does one know that is the inner self that is stepping up and making these important calls, and not the mind or some other part? Perhaps some kind of rating systems could be put together to prove that the inner self really is the inner self.
No, when it is your inner self speaking there is no doubt. No rating system needed.
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