Captain’s log, stardate 20181211

Can you measure happiness?

Sent by Jonathan Stark on December 11th, 2018

Here’s a question for you:

Can you measure happiness?

Most people would probably answer no to this.

But what if I asked:

Is your dog happier than usual today?

You’d almost certainly be able to answer that question.

What’s going on here?

People tend to confuse the inability to measure something exactly with the inability to measure it at all.

Detecting an improvement from a baseline over time is absolutely a measurement, and often a very useful one - even if you don’t use exact units to express the delta.

So ask yourself:

What are your clients measuring?
What are they observing to detect changes from the baseline?
How much would they like their future state to differ from the baseline?
How much is that difference worth to them?

If you can answer these questions, you’ve got a solid basis for a value price.

Yours,

—J