Flawed Perception
Building a Performance Longevity Dashboard
We all like to think we know ourselves. “I’ve been me for years,” you might say. “I have a keen sense of what’s going on with my own body.” Yeah, sure ya do. Why then do we all get surprised by our “all of the sudden” aches, pains, and bodily dysfunctions. I was chatting with a friend recently who lost 60 pounds in the last year or so. He looks and feels great. When he showed me a “fat picture” (his words not mine) what he said was really interesting to me. He said, “I didn’t even realize I was that big.” Mind you this is an intelligent and successful man. How could he not know? Well probably because nobody showed up all of the sudden with a 60# backpack that he had to carry around. The backpack filled up slowly, one ounce at a time over a long timeline.
We are all subject to fallacies in our perception that leave us vulnerable to being surprised by tipping points. Much of our brain is designed in fact to whittle down the amount of information that we get because it is easier to deal with. Our little thermostat of normalcy gets reset and we just sort of get used to stuff. Need more proof? Take a look at some methamphetamine addicts’ dental pictures. When you see some creepy crawlies living in their gums you’ll have all the proof you need to show that humans get can used to a lot of things over time.
Our off the shelf perceptual systems need calibration in order for us to operate more smoothly for the world. When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious actually. Much of our technological advancements come from the ability to more accurately measure the world around us and within us. If you want to know your blood pressure, do you simply think real hard? Of course not. Just like if you want to know how fast you’re going in your car you don’t lick your finger and stick it out of the window. You look down at your dashboard.
Dashboards are for the express purpose of taking the most important information and presenting it in a digestible format that allows the user to make sense of it and take action. It can provide useful information about real time operation like the speedometer in a car or the battery life on your phone. It can also provide information about potential malfunctions that are on the horizon like low tire pressure. Just like the dashboards in the cars we drive and the smartphones we use it can be helpful to build a dashboard that keeps our health and performance on track.
Our Performance Longevity Dashboard will help us calibrate our perceptions over time and become more attuned to information that we are getting internally from our intrinsic software. Additionally, the use of this dashboard will help us track progress toward goals and predict potential problems. We’ll begin to unpack that in the next article in this introductory series on The Check Engine Light.
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Thanks for reading,
Rob