When You Measure Something, You Destroy It
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There’s a law in economics that explains why the things you’re chasing stop meaning what they meant when you started chasing them.
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In 1975, a British economist named Charles Goodhart noticed something that should have changed how everyone thinks about goals. He was studying monetary policy, watching central banks try to hit specific economic targets, and he observed a pattern: the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The number that was useful when you were just watching it becomes useless the moment you start optimizing for it. Not gradually. Almost immediately. Because once you’re trying to hit a number, you start changing your behavior to serve the number instead of the thing the number was supposed to represent.
This became known as Goodhart’s Law. Economists cite it all the time. Almost nobody applies it to their own life, and that’s where it does the most damage.
How It Works in Small Ways
You start tracking your steps. At first, the number is a useful proxy for how active you are. It reflects your actual movement through the day. Then one night you’re at 9,400 and you pace around your apartment for ten minutes to hit 10,000. You didn’t become more active. You just served the number. The metric stopped measuring your health and started measuring your willingness to game your own system.
You start tracking how many books you read per year. The first few months, it’s a genuine reflection of how much you’re learning. Then you start choosing shorter books because they move the counter faster. You skim the hard parts. You finish books you’re not enjoying because abandoning them would lower your number. The metric that was supposed to measure learning is now measuring completion. Those are different things, but the number doesn’t know that.
These are small, harmless examples. The mechanism is the same one that ruins careers and corrodes entire lives. It just takes longer to see it when the stakes are higher.
How It Works in Bigger Ways
A company decides revenue is the most important metric. Revenue becomes the target. Salespeople start closing deals that aren’t good fits because the deals hit the number. Customer satisfaction drops. Churn increases. The company is growing on paper and rotting underneath, because the metric that was supposed to measure business health started measuring something narrower: the ability to generate short-term cash regardless of what it costs long-term.
A founder decides fundraising is the milestone that proves she’s succeeding. She raises a round. Then another. The company raises $50 million before it has a business model that works. The metric that was supposed to measure progress (investment as validation) corrupted the behavior it was supposed to reflect (building something valuable). She optimized for the fundraise instead of the business, and now she has a well-funded company that doesn’t work.
You’ve seen this play out in organizations you’ve worked in. The moment leadership decides on a KPI, the entire company starts optimizing for that KPI in ways that undermine the reason the KPI existed. Call centers measure average handle time and reps start rushing customers off the phone. Schools measure test scores and the curriculum narrows to whatever is on the exam. The original purpose gets sacrificed to the metric, every time.
The measure becomes the target. The target corrupts the behavior. The behavior destroys the thing you were trying to measure.
Every time. Without exception.
How It Works on Your Life
This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because this is where Goodhart’s Law does its quietest and most permanent damage.
At some point, you picked a number for your life. Maybe it was an income target. Maybe it was a title. Maybe it was a follower count, or a net worth milestone, or a specific house in a specific neighborhood. You picked the number because it represented something. Security. Freedom. Respect. Proof that you’d made it.
Then you started optimizing for the number.
And somewhere along the way, the number stopped representing the thing it was supposed to represent. The income target was supposed to buy you freedom, but the job that pays it costs you 70 hours a week and there’s no freedom in that. The follower count was supposed to validate your ideas, but you stopped sharing your actual ideas months ago because the algorithm rewards something different. You’re creating what performs, not what you believe.
The metric corrupted the behavior. You’re still hitting the number. The number doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
This is Goodhart’s Law running on your life, and it’s so gradual that you don’t notice until you’ve spent years optimizing for a target that stopped representing what you actually wanted a long time ago.
The Goals That Were Never Yours
There’s a version of this that’s even harder to see. Some of the metrics you’re optimizing for were never yours to begin with.
Your parents gave you a number. “Make six figures.” That number represented security in a world where six figures meant something specific. You hit it. It didn’t feel the way you expected. The goalpost immediately moved to $200K, then $500K, each one feeling just as far away as the original did.
Society and your industry gave you metrics too. Own a home by 30, get promoted every two years, hit certain benchmarks by certain ages. You shaped your career around what the system rewards instead of what interests you. You performed for the promotion cycle instead of doing the work that lights you up. And now you’re senior at something you’re not sure you care about, because the metrics were designed by institutions, not by you.
These weren’t your numbers. You inherited them. You absorbed them. You optimized for them so long that you forgot to ask whether they measured anything you value.
What Goodhart’s Law Looks Like From the Inside
I went through this. Not in some dramatic, life-changing way. In the slow, barely noticeable way that’s more common.
I had a revenue target for the business. The number made sense when I set it. It represented growth, sustainability, the ability to hire, the ability to invest in better content. Good reasons. Real reasons.
Then the number became the target. I started saying yes to deals that weren’t aligned because they moved the number. I started spending time on revenue-generating activities that I didn’t enjoy because they hit the metric. The number went up. My enthusiasm went down. The thing the number was supposed to measure, a thriving business doing work I believed in, was eroding while the metric it was supposed to reflect kept climbing.
Gina was the one who noticed. She said something like “you’re hitting all your goals and you seem less happy than when you started.” She was right. The measure had become the target. The target had corrupted the behavior. The behavior was destroying the thing I cared about.
I had to go back and ask a question I should have been asking all along: what is this number actually measuring right now? Not what was it supposed to measure when I set it. What is it measuring today, given how my behavior has changed in pursuit of it?
The answer was uncomfortable. The number was measuring my willingness to do work I didn’t believe in. That’s not what I signed up for.
The Audit Nobody Does
Most people have never done this audit. They set a goal, they pursue it, and they assume the goal still means what it meant when they set it. They never stop to check whether the pursuit has corrupted the purpose.
Try this. Take the goal you’re working hardest toward right now. The one consuming most of your energy. Ask yourself three questions.
What was this goal supposed to give me when I first set it? Be specific. Not “success.” What specifically? Freedom? Creative fulfillment? Security? Respect? Time with my family?
Is my pursuit of this goal currently producing that thing, or is it producing something else? This is where most people get honest for the first time. The goal was supposed to produce freedom. The pursuit is producing obligations. The goal was supposed to produce creative fulfillment. The pursuit is producing algorithmic content. The goal was supposed to produce time with family. The pursuit is consuming every evening.
Did I set this goal, or did someone else set it for me? This one takes longer to answer because most inherited goals feel like your own. You’ve been pursuing them so long that the origin is invisible. But if you trace the goal back to its source, some of them will lead to a parent, a culture, an industry, a peer group. Not to you.
If the pursuit is no longer producing what the goal was supposed to represent, the goal has been corrupted by Goodhart’s Law. You’re optimizing for a number that stopped meaning what you think it means. And the longer you keep going without recalibrating, the wider the gap gets between the metric and the life you want.
The Recalibration
The answer isn’t to stop setting goals. Goals are useful. Metrics are useful. Measurement is useful. The answer is to periodically check whether the measure still reflects the thing it’s supposed to measure, or whether your behavior has shifted so far in pursuit of the number that the number has become meaningless.
The people I’ve talked to who seem most at peace with their ambition are the ones who do this regularly. They don’t just ask “am I hitting my targets?” They ask “do my targets still mean what they used to mean?” And when the answer is no, they change the target instead of grinding harder against a metric that’s lost its meaning.
Goodhart’s Law says the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. What it doesn’t say, but what I think is equally true, is that most people never go back and check. They set the target and they chase it for years, sometimes decades, without ever asking whether the thing they’re chasing still represents the thing they want.
You might be working harder than ever right now to hit a number that means less than it did when you started. That’s worth checking. Probably today.
Thank you for reading,
Scott
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Sometimes you set the goals, you hit them, and you realize the goals own you. You always have to stop at certain points to reevaluate, to make your going where you really want to be.