The Best Self-Help is Free: Quantification and Productivity Targets

Chapter 9

This is Chapter 9 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

With an accurate, rational analysis of the existing state of affairs and the possibilities it entails, along with a realistic setting of expectations and a willingness to be satisfied with a sufficiently good result, the decisional component of productivity can be adequately addressed. The next challenge is to actually achieve what one desires, in the quantity in which one desires it. The following insights have been developed as a result of combining extensive deliberation with my practical experience; not only have they visibly worked, but it is possible to explain why they did.

Human minds tend to have a peculiar limitation; they are immensely well-suited to observing and accurately interpreting absolute states, but they are - when unaided - far less adept at adequately judging matters of degree. The presence or absence of something can be easily observed, but its quantity is a far more difficult matter. If Ayn Rand's "crow epistemology" might be taken as a guide, the human mind can only focus a finite, extremely small number of discrete pieces of information at once. Thus, while we might visibly distinguish between three things and five things, differentiating between 25,456 things and 11,233 things by simply looking at a collection of them is far harder. Rather, the latter case, most people would only be able to say that they see a lot of things - many more than they could count without undue expenditure of effort. But while the increase from 3 to 5 is about a 66.67% increase, that from 11,233 to 25,456 is an increase of 126.18%. While this increase might be missed by raw human observation, the presence of mathematics as a tool enables us to quickly grasp the significance of these relative differences in magnitude.