When better is not rewarded

A cashier at a busy supermarket in Beirut is measured on items scanned per minute. Faster hands, more items, a better score. What she does and what she is judged on are the same thing. There is nothing to work out.

A piano teacher three streets away has a harder problem.

She is very good. Her students learn to listen, to sit with a difficult passage until it opens, to love music they will still be playing at sixty. None of that shows up quickly. The teacher down the road, who gets children through a grade exam in record time and films them for the parents, has the longer waiting list.

Being the best teacher, in the sense she cares about, is not what the market is counting. Parents are not holding a stopwatch, because there is no stopwatch for this. They choose with what they can see, and what they can see is speed, certificates and a clip on a phone.

Most work is far more like piano teaching than like scanning. A seller who makes the more durable product, a writer who chooses the harder honest sentence, a shop that spends longer with each customer: the thing they believe matters may have only a loose link to the number by which they are ranked.

That is not a reason to stop caring about the thing. It is a reason to look clearly at the gap. Is the quality you are working on the quality anyone is choosing by? If not, either find the people who do choose by it, or accept that the score will not tell you whether you are good.

It is a harder question than it sounds, and most people never ask it.