The Metric

I did a lot today.

I finally made progress at baking bread.  I caught up with some friends and family that I have neglected in my drive for success.  I rode my bike to the office and finally found out how far I can swim.  Jericho and I have begun to share ideas and my muse has returned to sweeten my mind and renew my will.

The swimming is what I think you should hear about (everything else is either too personal or too private for a public blog), and it relates to the bread.

What I wanted to learn today was what I would do if I got into the Chicago Triathlon next weekend.  The reality is: not much.  I am not sure I would have made the cutoff.  It turns out I can only swim about a sixteenth of a mile without stopping.  I may be fast, but I doubt it.  There was another athlete there who was training for this years' triathlon and he could swim the full distance.  We talked a bit and he was encouraging and I learned from him.  But mostly I learned what I couldn't do.  More accurately: what I couldn't do yet.

Success is a strange thing.  We could all define success at what we do, but we would all define it differently from one another.  If pressed, all of these things would come down to a common reality: we can gauge our success only by a metric.  When I make bread, I can only know how well I am doing by the quality of the loaf.  In a race or competition, we have the clarity of a winner.  I have never liked any metric which is arbitrary.  In business we measure things by profit and revise it over time.  I prefer the clarity of a competition.

What I learned today was that I am not a strong swimmer.  But I also got a sense of what I will have to do to get stronger.  I put in twenty miles on my bike and often reached speeds greater than twenty miles per hour.  That is an indication that I can ride a bike, and pretty fast (I obey all the traffic laws so I stop at lights and signs and I weigh my bike down with supplies).  I wasn't always fast, but I worked at it until I was.  I am not done getting faster on my bike and I am not done getting faster in the water.

This is as much a life lesson as it is a lesson about design: we need to define the success of our work in order to know if we are improving.  And then we must consider where we are and what we want to do.  The Meers-Cat is in Rhode Island to run a half-marathon and he texted me to make jokes and so on, but he hit on a clear idea of what he wants.  We both ran Chicago a few weeks ago and neither of us felt good about our performance.  He wants to beat his best time and make up for doing poorly (according to his standard which is always improve his time).

Talking to Jericho, I got a sense of what he was after as well.  It's nice because it is the same goal as mine: develop a winning boat.  Don't worry too much about my other sports or goals: I intend to win a race, and for that I will develop a winning boat.