I have and loved it - it is responsible for my regular use of the word 'gumption.' But, now that you mention it, I should go back and read it again. When I first read it, I was much more technically oriented and have since shifted towards a focus on writing. This is largely what caused said quandary.
When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.
If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.
If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?
Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.
This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.
Speaking of long responses, feel free to ignore this, I just wanted to explore your idea a bit.
If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds like in your example of re-writing your landing page the question you're facing is "Can we measure the value that re-writing the landing page generated" (or even "Can we measure value"). It sounds like the elusive nature of the answer to this question is coming from a couple of sources:
1) Incompleteness of information - you can't possibly know who's sharing links to your site or what exactly caused every new visitor to decide to visit (was it just x,y, or z? simple correlation?).
2) Complexity of information - even with perfect information of the environment your site operates in - the number of variables affecting it is so large that it would be near impossible for you to comprehend how they all interconnect and determine the root cause of the up-tick.
3) Inherent subjective nature of value - The new trend could be fleeting, or even worse -- you might have changed something that increases short term performance but may be detrimental in the long term (Reddit gold?). This makes it hard to categorize this as good/bad/neutral.
I think the root cause of all of these issues in relation to your conundrum is the basic desire or need to categorize information we receive about the world. In this example, you would be attempting to categorize the rewrite as an action that was either positively, negatively, or neutrally valuable, and at least the above 3 limiting aspects of this information are preventing you from easily doing so.
The two extremes of the options you'd have, given this, would be on one end to try and minimize the limiting aspects of the information (maybe going so far as to invent some type of analytics tool with AI that can tell you with X probability that the action will be worth it), with the other extreme being to throw your hands up and ignore any information related to it. I think the question obviously isn't "which option do you choose" but rather where do you draw the line -- where do you stop and decide that whatever else lies beyond your current state of understanding can remain unknown?
I think in the literal sense, this is relatively easy, as we have to make choices based on limited information every day. The real trick is in the follow-through: refraining from judging our decision to limit ourselves (or not) as either good or bad.
When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.
If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.
If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?
Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.
This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.