A talk on why measuring your progress matters. The speaker uses skateboard kickflips and running speed as examples of how benchmarks help you improve skills instead of just hoping things get better.
I wanted to learn how to do a kickflip on a skateboard, right? You know, you do a little kickflip, you kick the skateboard, and it flips. And I had to measure my foot placement, like, where I'm placing it on the board. I realized, like, okay, if I have my foot here, my foot is, like, on top of the screws. I can't do a kickflip. My foot is too high up, and I do not flip the board properly. If I move my foot down about an inch and a half, I get the proper amount of kick while still getting a lot of pop from my back foot, and boom. It works, right? I try to measure everything. Listen, if you're trying to improve your running speed, you're only going to do it if you measure it. Then you try to beat the time that you just recorded. How do you expect to get better if you don't know what better is? If you don't know what the fucking benchmark is, if you don't know what this standard is, how are you going to beat it? You want to do better than you did yesterday? First you have to measure what you did yesterday.
