Are You Measuring Everything Except What Matters Most? 

What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

Today’s prompt asked what I wish I had started doing earlier in life. My answer surprised me. I wish I had started measuring the invisible: curiosity, kindness, courage, attention, the health of my relationships. Then I discovered that the moment you score these things, they begin to change into something else. Seneca, the Islamic practice of muhasabah, the Ignatian Examen, Buddhist mindfulness and an old Tamil work called the Thirikadugam all found a better instrument long ago. It takes five minutes a night and needs no numbers. I have shared the four questions I now ask myself. What would you add to the list?

The Ledger I Never Kept

Asked what they wish they had started earlier, most people reach for something countable: saving, exercising, learning a language. My answer sounds similar at first. I wish I had started measuring the invisible. The regret turned out to be stranger than I expected, and its truer version is almost the opposite of what I first believed.

1. We measure what is easy to hold. Money, marks, weight, promotions and followers all arrive with units attached. Curiosity, kindness, courage, attention and the quality of our relationships arrive with none, so they go unrecorded. Over decades, what goes unrecorded quietly goes unattended. I kept careful files for most of my working life. I kept no file on whether I was still listening to people.
2. My first instinct was simple: measure these too. Count acts of kindness. Rate the day’s courage out of ten. Log minutes of undivided attention. Our age makes this easy, and there is an app for almost every virtue.
3. That is where the trouble begins. Economists know it as Goodhart’s Law, usually summarised this way: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Count your kindnesses and you begin performing them for the tally. Score your attention and you start watching the score instead of the person. The invisible qualities are exactly the ones that die when they are turned into targets. A kindness done for the count has already become something else.
4. A line often credited to Einstein says that not everything that counts can be counted. He almost certainly never said it. It traces to the sociologist William Bruce Cameron, writing in 1963. The misattribution is a small lesson in itself: we trust a thought more once a famous name is attached. That is the visible ledger at work again.

So the real regret is not that I failed to count. It is that I failed to examine. The older traditions knew the difference.

1. The instruments already existed, and every one of them is a practice of attention rather than arithmetic.

The Stoic Seneca describes ending each day by reviewing it. He asked what fault he had cured, what temptation he had resisted, and in what way he was better.

Islamic spirituality calls the practice muhasabah, or self-accounting. A saying attributed to the Caliph Umar urges believers to take account of themselves before they are taken to account.

Ignatius of Loyola gave his companions the daily Examen: a few quiet minutes to notice where the day’s gratitude and failures lay.

Buddhist teaching speaks of sati, or mindfulness: a steady noticing that watches the mind without grading it.

The Tamil ethical work Thirikadugam [1] takes its name from a traditional remedy of three pungent spices. Each of its verses names three things that heal or harm a life, as if conduct were medicine, prescribed in small and careful measures.

1. Notice what these share. None of them counts. All of them attend. They measure the way a physician takes a pulse, not the way an auditor totals a column. The instrument is a regular, honest, unhurried look, repeated daily, because the invisible changes quietly.
2. The honest objection is that, without numbers, this is only vague self-reflection, easily flattered. It can be. A private review lets us grade ourselves generously. The traditions anticipated this, which is why most of them set the review before a standard outside the self: God, a teacher, a community or a precept. Such a review is not a mirror. It is a witness. Some light counting can help too, provided the number stays a servant. Noticing that you have not called an old friend in six months is data worth having. The danger begins only when the number becomes the goal.
3. So here is what I would tell my younger self. Keep your ledgers of money and marks, because they matter. But add one practice that costs five minutes each night. Where was I curious today? Whom did I actually see? What did I avoid out of fear? Which relationship grew thinner? Use no scores, only the questions, asked honestly and often.

I spent a career keeping records that no one would regret keeping. The record I wish I had started earliest is the one that fits on no form: a nightly account of the invisible, kept not to be graded, but to stay awake.

Note

[1] Thirikadugam is a Tamil ethical work by the poet Nallathanar and part of the Pathinenkilkanakku, a classical collection of eighteen shorter works on conduct and ethics. Its title means “three pungent spices”: dry ginger, black pepper and long pepper, which together make a traditional medicine. Each of its roughly one hundred verses follows that remedy’s pattern by naming three things that heal or harm a human life.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

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In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 20 September 2026

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