The Pain of Numbers

We are defined by numbers since day one in our lives - weight, tall, body parts, IDs and others. As we grow up, our performance is also measured by numbers starting with how many words we can say, how many steps we can walk and proceeding with how much we score in school, competitions and sports. Getting older our interest in numbers increases and things like how much money we earn, what size and how many followers we have become more important to us. We never get tired of counting for ourselves and for others and comparing the results. Despite the great examples of people who succeeded in proving to the world that numbers do not define them such as people with less body parts and people with over weight, older age and less marks, we keep throwing numbers in almost every job requirements and social activity programs limiting people’s potentials and discouraging them from trying to overcome these obstacles.

When shall we stop restricting people’s capabilities to our expectations from them according to the numbers assigned to them? Why don’t we give them a chance to show us what they can do instead of telling them what they should do?

Parents, teachers, coaches, partners, employers, clients, friends, strangers we all have standards and certain numbers that we use to evaluate other people; to evaluate their appearance, performance, success, achievements, failure, capacities, capabilities. We prejudge people based on these numbers though we personally might not like to be judged by numbers,

Time to Stop:

You parents. Can you allow your kids to fail a school subject they don’t like without making them feel they are less smart than other kids because of their failure. You teachers. Can you stop placing tall students in the back and short ones in the front and allow them to sit and look from the angle they choose? You sport coaches, can you accept people with different sizes in your teams and support them and treat them equally? You employers, can you stop evaluating experiences and qualifications by number of years and GPAs.

Time to Upgrade Our Thinking:

What if we reset our minds and think of other measuring methods to help us do our evaluations evenly utilizing individuals’ potentials and creativities. Think of it from engineering point of view. In order to have a very good controlling system, you need to disturb your process and analyze the effect of a single variable at a time in order to find out the optimal productivity conditions under a controlled process. We don’t just force equipment to perform under predesigned controlling system because every process is unique due to its own conditions and parameters even those processes that seem to be very similar; in fact, they are NOT! because inside each of them there is always that small difference that makes them operate and produce differently.