Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Is the Outcome Worth the Price?

Yesterday I rambled a bit and some of you are no doubt wondering where all those disjointed threads are leading. Allow me to begin by saying that there are many demands placed on the time of our lives. There are twenty-four hours in the day and assume you spend eight hours sleeping. That leaves sixteen. Now, there are the basic functions like the toilet, eating and taking care of basic physiological needs. Then, for those employed, there is getting to work and doing the job. Then, once home, there are basic parenting and maintenance chores. I could go on ticking off the tasks but the point is that the amount of available time is different for everybody. What is more certain is that the amount of disposable or “free” time is short and at a premium.

This brings us to the question, are all things worth doing, worth doing well? My father believed emphatically that anything worth doing should be done to the highest of standards. My graduate school professor contended that this wasn’t true. In my RC model airplane hobby I would have to side with my father. There is another adage that is popular and it goes to the effect that “If you don’t do something right you better get used to doing it over again.” On the other hand, if you spend all your time reaching out for perfection you aren’t going to get much done. While the statistical technique, Standard Deviation, (SD) cannot be directly applied to the expenditure of resources (Time is a resource) there’s a connection.

If you look at it, one SD gets you to a 68% confidence interval. Sixty-Eight percent would be considered a minimal level of “Mastery” in most educational systems. Not great but it gets a person into the ballpark. The important point is that a relatively small amount of effort (expenditure of time) gets a person to the opera. One might have to accept standing outdoors, sitting in the far bleachers or taking a back row seat but it gets you to where the fat lady sings. More importantly it allows us to pursue an area of interest without spending all our capital on a single interest. For example, think of what President Obama might have accomplished if he hadn’t spent all his political capital on Health Care.

What SD tells me is that someone can get to 68% mastery rather quickly but to go to the next level requires twice as much expenditure. In other words to go from one SD to two SDs requires doubling down. Using the example in an earlier blog the average was 96 and one SD was plus or minus three. Two SDs, increased the range to plus or minus six, but only got to the 95 percent level of confidence. For the price of one SD the 68% level was attained but it took 2 SDs to acquire an additional 27 percentage points. In other words going from one level to the next yielded a diminishing return. However, if you think that's a bad deal, look at what getting to 99% requires. To pick up a measly four additional percentage points required a third again more than what it took to get to 95% at the 2 SD level.

Now I realize this is something of an abuse of the mathematical construct but the principal still applies. What it takes to accomplish something is one thing, what it takes to do it well requires doubling down and what it takes to get close to perfection demands a third more, on top of everything else. The question we all must answer comes down to, “Is the outcome worth the price?”