The Quality of Your Life

My job title: Quality Auditor

My job function: To check the quality of the work performed and report my findings. From there I can help steer the quality in the right direction.

What I find: the things other people missed. The reason why it was missed doesn’t matter. Maybe they are having a bad day, or they didn’t get enough sleep because they had a sick baby at the house. It could have been an honest mistake or willful neglect. My job is not to investigate the reasons. It is to find the defects in the quality.

When it comes to auditing, I cannot have any preconceived judgments or misguided biases. It is only pass or fail. Do I hold the same criteria when I think about the quality of the lives of others? Or is my judgment clouded based on my own personal standards? And just because I see what they do in public, I have no idea what their lives are like in private. Their choices are not mine. Their motivations are different. Not right or wrong, only different.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking?

Henry Ford

I can audit the quality of a product, but I have no business auditing the quality of someone else’s life. Except…

My own.

The quality of my life. Public and private. Choices and motivations. I drive my own standards of quality. I choose the level. And when it comes to auditing it as a pass or a fail, I must judge that too.

If I want a better-quality life, I must look at it through the lens of a microscope. Does it look the same in the dark as it does in the light? Both good and bad choices must be reviewed. I need to ask why I made the good decision, so I can continue making them. I need to analyze the bad and what led me to it, so I can prevent similar bad choices in the future. Are my motivations in the right place? If not, then I must change its direction and steer it back onto course.

We are all responsible for determining our own quality standards. Once we figure it out, we can develop the processes that help us adhere to it. We can analyze and course correct. We can live in a state of quality of our own design.