Have I mentioned how much I love my job? Seriously, there are days where I feel like I should be paying my clients, not the other way around.

So, I’m working with an F-16 fighter pilot I just adore. He’s writing a book about goal achievement, about putting systems and disciplines into place in order to create massive success. Here’s the the thing about elite warriors like Jeff Orr: They know how to handle stress, manage lots of vital data coming at them fast, and pick out high-yield targets from the blur. One of the keys to their success is the ability and willingness to obsessively track certain things. (Which reminded me that, if I don’t want to weigh 300 pounds by Christmas, I need to get back to logging what I eat on sparkpeople.com.) Here’s a segment from his manuscript.  See what you think.

 

I’ve always played sports and worked out a lot, although, with the exception of my triathlon career, I had never bothered to keep track of any of the exercise I was getting. For that matter, I wasn’t even particularly inclined to track it. I was in pretty good shape, and that was fine with me.

That changed when I went to the cell phone store to upgrade my phone after my two-year contract was up. As part of the phone upgrade, they offered me a huge discount on a popular model of fitness tracker. The thing doubled as a somewhat fashionable watch, so I thought, what the heck, and I bought it.

Within a month, I was completely addicted to the app that derives data from the watch. At least a half dozen times a day, I found myself checking the length and quality of my sleep, my resting heart rate, the number of stairs I’d climbed, the number of steps I’d taken and more.

If my obsession with the tracker had ended there, it would have been a cool but ultimately useless curiosity. What happened though was that I started to correlate what the device was telling me with the results I was seeing.

For instance, I noticed that my resting heart rate had risen by 8 beats per minute on the day just prior to a three-day bout of feeling under the weather. Apparently, an increased resting heart rate is a leading indicator for me that I’m about to be sick and that I should lay off the hard workouts.

I noticed that if I had more than four days in a row in which I had worked out hard and that I also had more than 10,000 steps, I needed a day with no working out and much fewer steps in order to recover and feel good.

Some days, I would feel sluggish and looking at the app would show me that I hadn’t worked out in three or four days even though I could have sworn that I had been to the gym during that time. If I had more than three or four days in a row of less than 7 hours of sleep as recorded by the watch, I felt like an absolute zombie. I had to force myself to think about getting to bed earlier. Prior to owning my fitness tracker, I would have attributed my sluggishness or fatigue to whatever thought happened to be most available in my head. After, I had a virtual slap in the face telling me what I needed to do. Lastly, just knowing I had the device on my wrist keeping track of everything I was doing, it motivated to do more. I had this weird feeling that I was letting it down if I didn’t make the effort to put up some good numbers.

In the end, all of this worked to my favor in getting me into better shape.

Memory is fallible. My fitness tracker was the most recent reminder of this fact.

Because of memory’s limitations, and the natural human tendency to view the world through our own personal biases, fighter pilots closely track the things we care about.

After every sortie, the first thing I do when I arrive back in the operations building, even before I take off my g-suit and harness, is to fill out a training accomplish report (TAR).

The TAR has a list of over 50 different mission elements that experience has taught us are important to practice from time to time in order to maintain our proficiency at a safe level.

For instance, on poor weather days when we can’t see the runway, we have to fly an instrument approach that guides us through the clouds until we’re under them and can see well enough to make a normal visual approach. Flying an instrument approach isn’t the hardest thing that we do, but the results of getting it wrong can be disastrous. Tuning in to the wrong radio frequency, dialing in the wrong inbound compass heading for the approach or becoming disoriented due to a lack of outside visual cues are just three of the many things that could cause a pilot to fly into the ground.

We track to remain sharp. And alive.