On Preferring Gradient Scale Assessment To Hard Description

First and foremost I apologize for the title, I’m tryin’ here I really am, but I couldn’t think of a cooler, more, “roll off the tongue” nomer for this one, so again sorry about that. In other news you may have noticed that I’m again posting to the blog which would likely not have happened, at least not right now, if not for a friend of mine who I realized actually might enjoy my occasionally point finding ramblings. So keep in mind, we have my friend to thank for this piece being published at this time[insert round of applause]. Getting started with the meat of the piece, what I wanted to attempt to touch on today is a concept that I’ve been working with that looks to avoid our tendency to abdicate responsibility for dealing with various aspects of our lives. I’ve found this model to be incredibly useful in my own life, which I don’t intend to state lightly or in a self-serving way, and I hope others will find this concept useful as well. The idea is pretty simple, so this post probably won’t be too long, however, I hope the results of the model in one’s life will do most of the talking for me.

As we’ve probably all encountered, it is very commonplace to think of various descriptors, whatever they may be, such as intellectual, investor, “hands on learner” and so on, in a sort of hard or binary sense, where one is either in or not within the set of things described by the label. With descriptors that are more universal however, we run into the problem that it’s easy to use this model as an excuse for why we frankly, suck, at certain things. An easy test is to contemplate for a moment how many times one has said something to the effect of, “well I’m not a bodybuilder”, or “I’m not a/an x” in response to some question we perceive to be in the domain of whatever label we conjure up. Issue is, if we take some descriptor like investor, it is very easy to point out that all of us are “investors” because we are all allocators of resources of some kind, which encompasses more than just money and what is usually meant by capital. We all have energy, and time, usually money or other currencies as well that we must allocate. Our decision then, with the model I’m about to offer is not whether we are investors, but rather how we rank as investors. Here’s where the model comes in: rather than think in binary or boolean(true or false) terms, why not rate ourselves 1-10 to show where we think we are in relation to some descriptor?

Another thing besides retaking responsibility for that which is actually under our control, or may be under of control, this also makes it much easier to have a more clear sense of what our strengths and weaknesses are. It encourages us to be more honest and objective about how good we really are, by applying more thought to it, and bringing our self-assessments, and by extension, the assessments of others into a more quantitative domain. It should be noted of course, as the saying goes, that not everything that can by counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted, or something to that effect, so we shouldn’t get obsessed with quantifying something that shouldn’t be, but I find this is a great way to track various competencies and have a handle on areas that are well developed and areas that may be underdeveloped. I will spare going into the many applications of knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses, as that would be its own article, but it’s also worth noting that these personal assessments can help us to stay more aware of what we care about. There is some saying that goes something like, “what you appreciate, appreciates”, which I think beautifully captures the wisdom that one can figure out what they themselves care about, or someone else, by what they spend their time and resources on consistently. This, in unison with other concepts like price insensitivity, which could be re-conceptualized as “resource insensitivity”, and incentive tracking could be used to figure out what things are most valued in various contexts, which I suspect has self-evident value.

I hope that these ideas have been useful in some way, and I hope you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

Fourth Eye Blog Author