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Everybody likes to know how he's doing.

In sports that's so obvious that it's barely worth mentioning.  Whether you've just finished eighteen holes of golf, or three sets of tennis, or a two-mile run, one of the first things you're going to want to know about it is how you did:  in other words, your score.  This is true for spectators even more than for participants.  You think the millions of people who watched the last Olympics on television understood all the intricacies of gymnastic floor routines or bobsled balancing?  No - but all of them understood one thing.  They understood who won and who didn't, because they saw the figures.

Sometimes I think that scorekeeping is what accounts for the popularity of sports:  we all like to keep tabs on ourselves and our competitors, and in sports, at the end of every competition, you've got a straight-out presentation of the data that tells you how everybody did.  That's got to be one reason that spectators get so revved up, and that amateur athletes push themselves so hard, from the local sandlot to the Olympics.  Nobody pays an amateur to perform, so there's got to be another reason he plays.  Part of that reason is scorekeeping.

This ties in directly to motivation.  If you want to pick out the factors that contribute to good motivation, one way to go about it would be to look at activities that people choose to engage in on the own time, and with no conventional, external incentive such as pay.  Sports and other recreational activities come into this category.  Ask yourself what activities like tennis and bowling and computer games have in common, and why they are able to motivate people so strongly to spend their leisure time in improving them?  One answer is that they all have a well-defined scorekeeping system, one that gives immediate feedback to the individual.  That feedback on "how you're doing" is an essential aspect of motivation.  

Think of what these activities - of what any leisure activity - would be like if you didn't keep score.  Take golf, for example, which happens to be one of my favorite forms of culturally sanctioned insanity.

Golf has taken its raps over the years.  It's been called "slow" and "boring" more times than Abraham Lincoln has been called honest - usually by characters whose idea of excitement is being able to hit thirty words a minute on a typewriter.  The sportswriter Westbrook Pegler once referred to it as "the most useless outdoor game ever devised to waste the time and try the spirit of man."  Mark Twain was more succinct:  he called golf a "good walk spoiled."  And when you look at the actual physical activity of the sport, it's hard to claim that it's taken entirely a bum rap.  I mean, getting up with the roosters so you can walk three miles in the hot sun lugging a golf bag, and then lose your temper and your balls in the rough - is this a sane man's idea of fun?

It is for millions of people.  Like me, and a number of American Presidents, and comedian Joe E. Louis, who once proclaimed, "I play in the low 80s; if it's any hotter than that, I won't play."  Why?  I think it's because of the scoring.  Recording the score on each hole, you get instant feedback, and when you're done with those eighteen holes, you know exactly how you've performed.  You might not always like your score.  But even coming in at 30 over par is preferable to having no score at all.  And the hope of being able to better your score the next time out is one of the chief motivating factors that keeps you going.

This is true in professional sports, too, of course.  There's a direct, observable connection between good internal scorekeeping and success in professional sports.  By "internal scorekeeping" I mean the data retrieval and analysis that constitute performance measurement on every professional sports team:  all those play-by-play records that let the team members know, for any individual game, how the final score was arrived at.  The most successful pro teams spend an enormous amount of time developing these internal records.  Their Scorekeeping systems are incredibly detailed and personalized.  They don't just tell you how many yards were gained, how many penalties were incurred, and so on; they provide a score for each individual on the team, so each one knows how well he played the game.  This establishes an incentive for each player to improve - regardless of the outcome of the game itself.  Overall team improvement is the composite of all those individual performances, and they in turn can only be improved if they are constantly monitored and reviewed by means of individual "scores."

This is obvious to any professional sports manager.  It used to be obvious to managers in business, too, but in the past couple of decades they've begun to forget it.  The results have been disastrous.

 

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