Geometric Progression is the path to happiness

Have you heard people state that the world is becoming an increasingly complex place to live? I can unequivocally confirm that people are correct! In the beginning, God only had one rule, ONE Rule! He told Adam, "Yo Adam! you and your girlfriend can do anything you want, just don't eat fruit from one tree." That's it, nothing about maybe they should get some clothes on, or be discreet about what they do all day, or where they do it, nothin'. So what does Adam and his main squeeze do? Exactly what they were just asked not to do of course! So then they get booted out, and the world goes crazy with no rules until they almost get snuffed out completely. So then God tries ten rules, you know, to see how people like the idea. People like the idea so much, they make even more rules, so many so that they then have to make rules to get around all the other rules. This time, instead of creating an ember out of the earth, or sending some fire breathing dragon, or making the earth a snowball, or a giant waterpark, or a black hole, He sends Jesus to 'splain what He was trying to get at with the original ten rules. In fact Jesus dumbs it down for everyone to only two rules, just two; Love God with all you've got, and love everyone else like you take care of yourself. The idea took a little while to catch on, but finally people seemed to like Jesus' idea. In fact, after a while folks thought it might help if they 'splained what Jesus meant, so they kind of embellished and expanded the original two rules; you know, to help people get the drift.

Well, the Founding Fathers of what would come to be known as The United States of America had heard about the original one rule, the ten rules, and also the two rules after that. So, they thought three rules would be a nice compromise. A committee was formed to decide on what three rules to use. Being the forward thinking men they were, they ignored those other rules and made up some new ones they thought would be kinda nifty. You might have heard of these new rules, pursue life, pursue liberty, pursue happiness. Well from there it's been a relatively steady, uwavering course for over two hundred years. However the modern complex times we now live in have required modern complex thinking to address these increasingly complex times of increasingly complex thinking. To corraborate this analysis I have learned, from anonymous company sources close to the situation, that the company I work for (which will remain nameless to protect the innocent, but I will code name GM to assuage your curiosity) is implementing a new performance assessment program to help people navigate through these increasingly complex times of increasingly complex thinking. The new system is clearly an attempt to fix obviously manifested problems of rising morale resulting from a functioning simple performance appraisal system coupled with rumors of a company turnaround. Now it is well understood by HR professionals that the best way to remove your best employees (who also typically have the highest salary and therefore cause excess economic burden to the corporation) is not by direct denegration of their performance but by prolonged illogical actions. So a "new" three-by-three-by-three matrix system has been developed. It is a three square by three square with three colors (creatively colored red, yellow, and green) for each box, thus producing the highly complex cube. What is most encouraging about the potential of this new system to create the desired effect is that no longer are your undefined boxes colored by your supervisor, the one that should actually understand your performance, rather they are to be colored by the group decision of all the managers who you do not report to. A fictitious character named Jack Nicholson was used to help explain to 250 scientists and engineers the subtle nuances of how the new system would be applied to the performance of an Actor.

Being the high performer that I am, I have decided to create a stretch goal for myself to expand the three-by-three-by-three cube to a twenty-seven by twenty-seven matrix using only the colors white and blue to reduce printer costs associated with using the dye-sublimation color printers for three colors. My goal is to thoroughly understand the intricacies of the new personnel system such that one day before I am escorted out of the facility I will have my performance matrix appropriately colored with the letters GM to show my loyalty. Not wanting to be outdone, some Director of VP, will expand my twenty-seven by twenty-seven square matrix to some next logical size, say eighty-one by eighty-one to demonstrate their quest for perfection.

The lesson to be learned from this? It's not how well you perform, but how well you perform in showing how much you will exceed your original performance estimates.