Metrics of Success

One of the long-running themes in this, well, running training that I'm doing is developing many definitions of what counts as success. There's the success that comes from starting a run every morning; there's the success of acknowledging a mental block or a bad feeling and then learning to let go of that obstacle; there's the success of smiling at the morning, regardless of what the weather is; and of course the success that comes from adding miles. One of the great things about beginning running as a beginner is that (a) it's possible to let go of expectations about how fast or far you should go and (b) it's immediately and obviously visible that your overall fitness is improving. [Today's success was running a 7 minute mile for the first time in over a decade, and probably more than that.] And that feeling of success has this wonderful compounding effect - I wake up excited to go for a run again, excited to think about the next challenge, excited to search for something new, however incremental it is.

If only writing worked that way.

It sort of works that way, I guess. There are lots of different ways to define a successful writing day or writing practice: A good turn of phrase, a little bit of lapidary brilliance, 250 new words, even 500 on a good day. Maybe something submitted. So I guess those are all different definitions of success, ways to bring me back to the writing interested and curious.

But there's also something about the tempo of feedback loops in writing. In running (and teaching) the feedback is more or less immediate. Yes, the growth and long-term gains are incremental - but every day, there's a feeling of, Ah, yes, I completed this thing and can immediately assess how I feel about it. With writing - and academic writing in particular - there's a sort of delayed experience that I find really challenging. Various publishers now provide new metrics to let you see 'in the moment' the visibility of your article - its Altmetric score, the number of times it's been read and downloaded and cited - but those new metrics are a double-edged sword: On the one hand, great, there's a new mention, there's a new marker of success! On the other hand, wow, nothing has changed since yesterday or this morning, that must mean the article is a failure and a waste of time. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.