What’s Your Number?

There’s pow­er in focus.

If you’re famil­iar with the activ­i­ty band “craze”, the Nike Fuelband (shown above) takes a dif­fer­ent approach to “wear­able fit­ness mon­i­tor­ing” tech­nol­o­gy than most of their com­peti­tors. Nike presents a sin­gle num­ber, the com­po­si­tion of which is not pub­licly shared. Meaning, you don’t know how they arrive at the num­ber you’re see­ing.

I love sim­plic­i­ty, and the sim­plic­i­ty of NikeFuel. Once you trust your NikeFuel, it’s sim­ple. In fact, our Elephant’s Paycheck Tracker is sim­i­lar­ly focused on a key num­ber (Your Elephant’s Paycheck).

This key num­ber acts as a mean­ing­ful goal, which helps sim­pli­fy how you adapt your behav­ior towards meet­ing your goals. While oth­er health bands require that you track steps, and heart rate, and give you tons of sta­tis­tics (that could be fun if you’re a num­bers geek) you need to inter­pret the sta­tis­tics to fig­ure out if you’re meet­ing your exer­cise goals. With NikeFuel, track only your NikeFuel and you know how you’re doing. No trans­la­tion nec­es­sary.

One dif­fer­ence between your NikeFuel and your Elephant’s Paycheck is trans­paren­cy.

You’ve fin­ished a meet­ing on the 25^th floor, and have 30 min­utes before you need to get ready for din­ner. Do you walk down 25 flights of stairs, head to your room and get ready? Or, do you take the ele­va­tor down and use your time in the gym on the sta­tion­ary bicy­cle? You don’t know which will give you a high­er NikeFuel because you lack trans­paren­cy for how the num­ber is cal­cu­lat­ed.

Your Elephant’s Paycheck is com­plete­ly trans­par­ent. You under­stand the com­po­nents (the com­pa­nies you own), and what they did in the last year. Specifically, you know what past year’s div­i­dend increas­es were. Using that infor­ma­tion we deliv­er an Elephant’s Paycheck Projected Raise so you have some idea how you’ll per­form over time. This one-two punch of sim­plic­i­ty and trans­paren­cy helps moti­vate, while keep­ing you focused on mean­ing­ful goals toward retire­ment.