The Uncertainty Principal

Did I tell you that I spent some time travelling last month… The best bit about plane rides is reading, well when you get sick of movies anyway. 

I picked up a Stephen Hawkins book at the airport for some light reading as I flew over the Indian Ocean. I learnt that you can’t measure speed and location at the same time. 

As I looked at my Garmin this morning (a very slow 7 minute per kilometre pace – more on that later) I realised that the only way Garmin knows that I am moving (so slowly) is that it is measuring my average speed between two points. It doesn’t really know exactly what my speed is at one point. It’s impossible… It’s called the ‘Uncertainty Principle’ and it’s the kind of thing that astrophysicists love to talk about. To be fair, when it comes to your car, and my Garmin, we can get close enough for us to understand why I lose races, or why you get a speeding ticket. 

Then I got thinking about those times we look at ourselves and we might be feeling like we are not making any progress. Often we are defining ourselves and our progress in a moment. It might be a tired moment, it might be a moment of failure or frustration. It might be a moment of doubt or sadness. 

My ‘Uncertainty Principle’ lesson was that we can only meaningfully measure ourselves over time. I started thinking about how ‘where I am right now’ is not going to capture what has been going on and that I need to take a chunk of time, and measure all that has been going and all that has fed into it. If I want to make any improvements, I need to look at improvements over time. 

Back to that 7 minutes / KM pace. 2 years ago (a slightly younger man) and 10 kilograms ago (a slightly lighter man) I was running under 5 minute KM’s. That did not happen overnight. Actually before I started running, I never considered myself a runner. That was done through gradual improvement over time. 

My thoughts – forget the measure of right now. It is not accurate anyway. Take a chunk of time and set your targets to that. And if you want to compare yourself (even if you are comparing yourself to past achievements), compare it over time.

Nothing was accomplished in an instant, but don’t underestimate the progress that you can make incrementally over time.