Metrics of Success

One of the good things that emerged over the course of 2020 was running. I'd run in college as part of playing ultimate frisbee; I'd run sporadically in the years that followed, usually for a week or two before stopping again. After all, I told myself, I was riding my bike a lot. And then I let it go for what felt like a long time. But for a variety of reasons, I began to run again in 2020.

There are lots of things that I've taken from it, but one of the most useful for me has been the opportunity to put my feelings about running in conversation with my feelings about writing. Running - and especially running with the guidance/accountability of the Nike Rub Club - has been great. Week in, week out, I can track progress in a variety of ways. Running 3 times in a week, reaching a weekly total of 15 km, gradually leveling up. The app is really well designed to give that kind of feedback. I've also come to really appreciate the guided runs - partly I use the guided runs because that's what the 'program' (training for a marathon) tells you to do, but they have also become a really great opportunity to check in with myself. Today's guided run asked a seemingly simple question: How do you define success? What, in other words, makes a successful run? Is it just starting in the morning? Is it breathing easily? Is it running relaxed? Is it setting a personal PR for distance or pace? It could be all those things. And so the take-away lesson from this morning's run: The more ways you have to define a 'successful' run, the better off you'll be.

It resonated with me because it feels like one of the perennial issues that I struggle with in my professional life is figuring out what success looks and feels like - and even more specifically, figuring out what successful writing should look like.

"Tell yourself something good about yourself." That piece of advice came a few minutes into today's run. Funny (shocking? not really surprising?) how rarely I begin my writing with that ethic.

Part of my daily routine before I start writing - multiple times a day, in fact - involves clicking over to my Google Scholar page just to check if there any new citations. They trickle out over the course of the year (more in 2020 than in 2019! A sort of citational PR), but there's also something perpetually dissatisfying about this metric: this is the measure of success?

What defines success? One of the challenges I have - and I've learned to recognize this about myself - is that I'm prone to searching for validation from external sources. It's one of the reasons the running app is so valuable for me - it's a metric separate from myself that's nevertheless about me. But I suppose what I found so useful about this morning's guided run was its opening observation: Just starting the run. That's the first success. And it extends to writing, too, I think: Just opening the page and beginning to write - that's the first success. There are lots of other things I can't control, but this morning, I opened to a new page, began to write, put words down where none existed before. That, too, is a kind of success.