I have been reading a fascinating book called “Triumphs of Experience” by George Vaillant. Dr. Vaillant is a psychiatrist at Harvard and he ran the Harvard Grant Study for many years. The Grant Study started in 1938 with detailed psychiatric and physical testing of over 200 Harvard sophomores and followed those same men for the rest of their lives. I won’t try to summarize the findings – you should read the book yourself if you are interested.
In the book Dr. Vaillant struggles with a way to quantify a successful life. This is a hard thing to do: to find a quantitative way of measuring a qualitative standard. Here is how he did it – it is a very useful tool.
He thought back to one of the more common bar arguments: is this athlete more athletic than that athlete? Is this basketball player more athletic than that boxer? This question is very open to interpretation and usually leads to a lot of circular argument. So Dr. Valliant came up with the idea to quantify who is more athletic: have them compete in a decathlon. The winner is the more athletic.
A decathlon is ten track and field events: Day 1: 100 meter sprint, Long jump, Shot put, High jump, 400 meter run; Day 2: 110 meter hurdles, Discus throw, Pole vault, Javelin throw, 1500 meters. It tests upper body and core strength, anaerobic conditioning, explosiveness and cardio conditioning. Each of these events are concrete and measurable.
Dr. Valliant applied this idea of taking the important aspects of a qualitative decision and finding quantitative measures to evaluate them. In short he came up with a well thought out scorecard to measure a successful life.
This can be used for all kinds of questions that appear to be qualitative: employee reviews, choosing between consultants, or who is the better athlete: LeBron James or Connor McGregor. Just break down the important aspects of the qualitative question and find the right quantitative tests to measure them. Then run the measurements and total the score.
We should find a track and convince LeBron and Connor spend a couple days to do the decathlon so we can finally resolve that discussion…
LeBron wins. He's better. :)