You Get What You Measure

The principle — flagged directly by Kyle’s marginalia in Atomic Habits — that the metric you track becomes the behavior you produce, for better or worse. James Clear’s passage that Kyle annotates “You get what you measure”: “The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. If your success is measured by quarterly earnings, you will optimize sales, revenue, and accounting for quarterly earnings… The human mind wants to ‘win’ whatever game is being played.” Clear’s summary line: “we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.”

The flip side in the same book is generative: outcomes are a lagging measure of habits — “Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits… Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. You get what you repeat.” So measurement both reveals what compounds and warps incentives when the chosen metric is a poor proxy for the underlying purpose — a Goodhart-style caution Kyle carries into how goals and metrics get set.

Context: The idea is a close cousin of Goodhart’s Law (“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”), widely cited in management and incentive design.

Where this appears

• Atomic Habits — Kyle’s “You get what you measure” note on Clear’s quarterly-earnings/scale example, plus the “we optimize for what we measure” and “lagging measure of your habits” passages.