What's normal? Average?

In my quest to know where I stand, I have attempted to measure my sustained place in this world against others. What's my level of greeness? Am I good, bad, or even the dreaded "average"?

In fact, I started my work on sustainability with a trip to the Energy Star web site to measure my energy use against others in an attempt to see where I stand. As I blogged then, my house was a zero on a scale of zero to one hundred. That's pretty bad.

Reader Mathias sent a link for Wattzon, another site with a measuring tool against all others who have filled out the simple forms. They go a step further and try and convert everything to watts to allow us to compare apples to apples.

But I suggest the flaw in all of this is us measuring against the average. Not because it isn't fun, but because it isn't useful. In fact, I think measuring at all against each other is seriously wrong headed. (It smacks of my religion being better than yours, and we know where that ends up.)

As my brother-in-law says, half jokingly, it's a personal journey.

So how do we encourage ourselves on our personal sustainability journey? How do we know when we have accomplished something meaningful? Worthwhile to our planet, kids, grand kids etc? We should measure against ourselves.

Bottom Line #1 - We need to measure our journey's successes against our own pasts.

I believe in goals, but again, setting a goal against the average, or your neighbor, isn't relevant in my view. Set a goal to achieve a 30% reduction in all things related to sustainability, compared to yourself. Measure your starting point, and take out 30%.

I think you'll find that 30% is mostly waste, not use. That 30% is the way we did things out of habit or the way we were taught. That 30% is also things that are available today to help us get there with reasonable cost and payback.

Bottom Line #2 - We need to eliminate the waste, build new habits and put to use some new products or services to help us achieve 30%.

So you might encounter someone who brags about their footprint, their journey, their rain barrels. Have them tell you me how much they have reduced against their start of this journey. If they can, that person is trying to better themselves, not compete against someone else.

If you get a long story about the effort or money spent, or how cool their new Prius is, don't take it as a challenge, they are probably hiding a Hummer at the lake house.