Working in higher education, I have no shortage of success metrics. Having a science background, I tend to find comfort describing my performance using numbers. As a teacher of students and leader of my department, I regularly have to provide feedback on progress toward achieving academic or organizational goals. My wife, Dr. Jennifer Edwards, also a faculty administrator taught me a valuable success metric while teaching our daughter about what we do every day.
After coming home from work, my wife called me over from the kitchen to hear our daughter tell us something she learned that day. When I arrived, our preschooler explained to me that "quantitative means numbers and qualitative means words." While my daughter learned something about data, I learned something about success.
