More data, less fun

Wonderful are those runs where everything just comes together. You ate right last night, or just woke up in the right mood. The temperature’s perfect, the streets are clear, the playlist is on point, and you pull an amazing outlier performance out of the bag. You’re surging as you come to a halt and mark the run as finished. You feel like a winner.

And the app tells you that you’ve just pulled off… your 43rd fastest run.

I’ve been using the same running app for about six years.

In that six years there have been highs and lows, sprints and slogs, beautiful sunny morning runs around the park and relentless battles against the wind on lonely cliffs. There have been four half-marathons (and another one coming up shortly).

But the longer I have the app, the more it knows, and the more it knows, the less rewarding our relationship is. At the beginning it was all ‘yay! Your first 5k’ or ‘wow, gold star’. Little animations and medals popped up almost every time, reinforcing the endorphins and providing that little dopamine hit that phone apps are so good at.

Now… not so much.

Because the more data it collects, the more average I get.

And who wants to be average? We love to live life in colour. It’s why we pay attention to outliers, the unexpected, strange standout events. The moments that bring life into relief.

But data loves to flatten everything out. And the more data we have, the flatter life’s curve gets.

John Lewis’ legendary series of Christmas ads are among the most celebrated, awarded and effective campaigns in advertising history. In media, John Lewis consistently underspends against its retail rivals, getting (at least) twice the attention for half the money.

And yet, the team that makes the ads doesn’t research them. They write the same brief every year (proposition: the home of thoughtful gifting) and spend the rest of their considerable time and effort on writing great ads and having honest, useful conversations with their client.

They could ask hundreds or thousands of people what they think (like their rivals do). But they know that more opinions won’t make the ads better. Trusting their gut, each other, and the process of doing great work will.

Sometimes when we’re stuck in a problem, we can’t see the wood for the trees. But too often the instinct is to add more trees, just because we can.

Whether we’re looking for insight, watching ad breaks or grinding through a Sunday morning 10k, we’re wired to look for the standout moments.

Will more data, more knowledge, more opinions will help us find them?