Math Is The Path

I was listening to Chris Harder’s podcast and heard him say something that made a lot of sense to me: Math is the path.

If you want to improve anything about your life, you need to be able to measure its change over time. We all seek this vague idea of ‘improvement’, and we don’t have the insight to know if we’re achieving it without having numbers to calculate. 

For something to improve means that it produced a more desirable result. Your mile time improves when it takes you less time… Your income improves when you get a bigger check at the end of the month… Your diet improves when you reduce the grams of sugar or number of carbs you’re eating on a daily basis.

Each of these examples have the same thing in common - numbers. Math.

You can measure how things were, compare that to the measurement for how things are now, and if the current measurement is closer to what you want than the past measurement, then you can conclude that things improved.

I once heard Tom Bilyeu say “If it can be math, it should be math” and it’s for the same reason. Having objective data helps you directly compare two results. Otherwise, it’s a subjective comparison that isn’t standardized and therefore, vulnerable to bias and misunderstanding.

That’s not to say that improvement, progress, and growth are strictly a science. There’s a lot of art in it too. The factors that go into producing the numbers are complex. It’s often difficult to attribute one thing to causing change because it’s nearly impossible to isolate all variables but one. 

This is where interpretation comes in. You take what you know and what you’ve come to understand, and you apply that to create the reasons you think a result changed. 

You objectively ran a faster mile… Why? Was it a stricter diet, a better training plan, more energy on the day of?

Or your business objectively did more in revenue this month than last month. Why? Is it because of a better offer, a strong marketing campaign, or the fruits of something you did a while ago that’s finally paying off?

Every result we have in life must comply with the law of cause and effect. Certain things went in to produce a certain output. Improvement involves clearly understanding what that output is by having a standardized measurement. Interpretation comes in to figure out what is most responsible for creating that result.

This is exactly why the first step of the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge is to implement a foundational layer performance tracking in your life. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and this gets you in the habit of consistently measuring how things are going so you can actually know if you’re improving, or not.