Your life as a Control Chart

A control chart is typically used in a manufacturing or chemical process facility to detect if operation is as normal. There are a variety of rules to detect abnormal operation but the bases is essentially that if your state variable falls out of accepted range, something has happened and you need to investigate.

Lets apply the same concept to your life. If you assume that your brain works on 3 second intervals and can record a memory from any 3 seconds then you have 838656000 possible memories in an 80 year life. How many of those can we actually recall? Not being 80, or able to count that high prevents me from putting a number on it, but our memory certainly records far less than what we observe.

If you take all of those 3 second chunks and plot them on a chart, similar to a control chart you see the following (just not with 3 second chunks in the example, just to make a point).

The majority of your normal everyday happenings fall in the middle and are relatively inconsequential. It is the important events, that fall out of control, that we retain memories from and that define our experience.

Think of the control chart when you're living life. Keep everything between the gutters when you can, and remember the small blips (either up or down)are just everyday noise and won't even show up later. But always aim for peeks, above the upper control, for those will latter be your fondest memories.