Charles Handy: Relativity Anxiety

Charles Handy on the pitfalls of comparing yourself with others, and the lies that statistics tell

I have a habit of comparing notes with my old Oxford friend, David. I was a trainee at Shell when I left Oxford. He became a trainee doctor at St Thomas’ Hospital and we got together once a fortnight to compare notes on our lives and, inevitability, on our salaries.

You would expect that, as a trainee oil executive, I would do better than David but you’d be wrong. Relative to David I was way behind. Luckily, I had taken the precaution of consulting the University placement office and found out the average earnings of the Oxford graduates in their first five years and discovered, to my relief, that I was in the top 10 per cent.

So I wasn’t too upset when it turned out that David was paid twice as much as me. I dismissed it as irrelevant. But that is the trouble with statistics. You can make them prove anything you want.

So throughout my early work life I made sure I compared myself with people I was sure would be earning less than me. But if I wanted to motivate myself, I would go for another lunch with David.

Likewise, on a grander scale, look at all the graphs produced about our economic growth. You can make that thin red line go up or go down or go flat just by changing where you start on the vertical scale.

If you started way back in time and way up in the middle of the vertical scale, it would go flat for a long time. You can even, by starting way up at the top, make it go down if you have some reason for doing that. So that’s why I think statistics are a very powerful tool (and so do the PR people). And they can be very dangerous if you don’t understand them.

So I hope that when our Prime Minister recommends that we should start learning maths, he includes statistics as part of that. The ability to know how to compare numbers gives you immense power, so I discovered myself. Take care when you see a number. A number on its own means nothing unless we know its relevance. So, beware!

It was a long time before I learnt to be comfortable with myself. On the sports field, when I was younger, I longed to be like the big boys, but I knew I could never be equal to them. So I had to be comfortable with shining in the lower teams and pretend to myself that was the relativity of where I belonged.

Of course, all of this is nonsense, really. I should learn to be comfortable in myself however good or bad I am relative to others.

I remember in my sports crazy school I was so ashamed that I got a scholarship to Oxford that I hid myself in the library for most of the week until I was brave enough to creep out and face the mocking world.

I hope that none of you suffer from my ridiculous relativity anxiety and that you are comfortable with who you are and what you are.

Published by William Heinemann, Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles Handy explores the issues and dilemmas – both moral and creative – raised by the turning points of his long and successful life. Buy a copy below: