Posted by Luke Fishback

Some truths transcend their original context. In Jim Collins’ modern classic, Good to Great, he classifies the qualities of businesses with exceptionally high growth rates over sustained periods of time. The findings sound a lot like timeless common sense, and one quality struck me as particularly applicable to energy consumption.

If you’ve read our blog before, you know our mantra, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” But sometimes measurement feels uncomfortable and painful. Fear of the unknown thwarts us from wanting to discover what ugly truth may lie behind door #1. Maybe it’s a test result that will have implications for our health or an auto tune-up that reveals this may be a more expensive bill than we’d planned on. That feeling of unknowing can be terrible.

And yet, Collins finds that truly excellent businesses, the ones that have gone from mediocre to awesome, share the quality of confronting the brutal facts. They don’t stop there, though. They possess the rare combination of confronting the facts while also having an unwavering faith that they will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. Collins calls it the “Stockdale Paradox,” but for the purposes of this post, I’ll call it the heroic combination.

The second element, unwavering faith that you’ll prevail, can be difficult. The challenges of global warming or even the thought of having to change our behavior can make us want to throw up our hands. “This is too hard, too tedious, too hopeless,” we say. “I don’t want to know how bad it is.” But our greatest heroes are those who face the facts and press on with the faith that they will prevail.

Our goal at PlotWatt is to give you rich information about what’s happening in your home… which appliances are consuming the most energy and how much energy you’re consuming on a day-to-day basis. Sound scary? It may be, at first. Remember the heroic combination though. Armed with the facts, you can prevail to make far-reaching, sustainable reductions to save you money and prevent tons of energy from being generated. Then, you’ll be an energy efficiency hero. And who knows, maybe tomorrow you’ll fly around the planet so fast that you reverse time to save the world. With heroism, you’ve got to start somewhere.