Things that matter cannot be quantified

I came from a consulting background and in our world, NUMBERS rule them all. Everything can be quantified – people, hours spent on project, minutes spent on meetings, project cost, mileage from office to client site, per diem, etc. And if you are sitting in the office without any assignment, it means you have ZERO chargeable hour….and low utilization rate, which means you’re not earning money for the company.

Chargeable hours low = not valuable to the company. Easy isn’t it?

But is this the only thing a company should look at? Is this the only thing WE should look at, be it in our career or in our daily life?

I don’t think so. There are a lot more intangible things that we should not ignore – how is the team spirit whenever this person is present, what is the customer’s feedback on his work, how is his work attitude, etc.

Obvious as it seems, these things are hard to be quantified and thus, hard to be measured by the company.

Similarly in our life, we always tend to neglect things that we cannot quantify.

• The short but memorable time we spent with someone.
• The importance of a hand-made gift if compared to an expensive one.
• A 10 minutes life lesson sharing session with a Cancer patient compared to a 30 minutes motivational talk from a millionaire.
• Or the value of an employee who is talented in his work but can’t work with other people, versus an employee who has normal skill set but can bring the whole team together.

Perhaps, it is the way we all have been brought up, in this world which values numbers and everything quantifiable. But you and I both know that there are so many important things in life which cannot be quantified. Things that really matter in life.

I used to think that way….where spending a certain amount of time with my loved ones is more important than the quality of the time spent itself….until one day, someone dear to me told me….it matters not how many days we spend together, but the precious moments that we create from those time we spend together. Which, really makes sense to me.

So the next time you want to spend time or do something, make sure that you stop caring so much about the things that can be quantified and start focusing in creating precious moments that cannot be quantified at all.

Because life, in the end, is not something that can be quantified itself.