Why One Day Doesn't Matter: The Importance of Tracking Progress Over Time

Do you ever feel like a loser?

Do you ever tell yourself “I suck” because of an awful performance?

I know I do. 

Think about all of the times you felt like you were on top of the world: growing at a rapid rate, surpassing your peers, and crushing all of your goals. 

But then, just when you feel like you are really hitting your stride, something happens - the world flips upside down -  you fail; you lose; you eat sh**. 

You can’t quite explain it or conjure up a sound reason as to why, you just do.

In jiu jitsu, this very pattern seems to happen to me quite often. I’m winning consistently, attending class, progressing, and overall, feeling great. 

But then, everything goes south… 

I’m getting absolutely tormented in training. I’m getting submitted by people that I am ‘supposed’ to be better than.

People that haven’t been showing up.

People that haven’t been putting in the same amount of effort.

Why do I suck so much?

Substitute [jiu jitsu] with anything else you might do… 

Getting told no on a sales call.  

Losing a pickleball game. 

Cheating on your diet.

Not hitting your numbers. 

Missing a workout. 

Feeling humiliated by your lack of intelligence on a given subject. 

Not coming through on a project deadline.

Forgetting to pick up the groceries on your way home for work.

The list goes on… 

All of these individual instances might make you feel like a failure. 

And in that moment, you might be.

You didn’t come through. You lost. You failed. 

It’s natural for us to think this way. We are reactive creatures. We think, feel, and act upon meaningless and short-lived interactions.  

We assess our performance based on singular outcomes, and judge our entire ethos based on these isolated data points.  

That said, you can't accurately measure your progress, based on how well you did at ‘practice’ on any given day. 

Failure or success is not a static result. It’s a fluid state. 

You don’t measure your progress based on a single point in time, you track those points over weeks, months, and even years. The more points, the more insight. 

Therefore, progress can only be measured over a given period of time with multiple data points. The longer the time frame, the more accurate the result.

You had a bad day? Bad week? Bad month? 

So what. 

If you are working towards anything substantial you are going to have bad [days]. Things aren’t always going to click, your timing will be off, your ‘A’ game won’t work, you will deal with injuries, and life will get thrown in the way.  

If you zoom in on that day, week, or month, you might see a lull, a decline, a failure.

That said, if you zoom out and look at your entire lifespan (from beginning to end), you might see something different. 

You might see a bumpy, but positive trend upwards, filled with peaks and valleys - a steep mountain of growth.

This is what mastery is all about. 

This is why one day doesn’t matter.  

This is why it is important to track progress over time. 

Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher once said:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

What might look like a failure on a given day, might be 50x greater success than from where you originally started. 

So track your progress, document your journey, and look at the bigger picture to get an accurate depiction of your actual progress.

Own the Process,

Tim

Author & Founder