Ballet & the Quantified Self
Contrary to the trend among athletes of meticulously tracking internal stats, ballet mostly rejects the quantified self.
Ballet is a deeply mystical form of elite athletics. Dancers perfect training exercises from the 1800s, tricks for dealing with budding injuries are handed down in hushed tones in the wings during performances, steps are practiced obsessively for decades not to hit numbers of pirouettes or angles of incline but to imbue them with a delicate precision that's impossible to quantify directly.
After I retired, I raged against the quantified self even as I gleefully embraced modernity for the first time—ballet, particularly in Europe, exists in a microcosm mostly separate from modern life, which leaving felt tantamount to leaving for a different century altogether.
The compromise that struck me as almost impossible to elude was that of trading better intuition for better data. People point to their sleep scores to say they're tired. What happened to just feeling tired? Would you even know to feel tired if you hadn't checked the score?
I caved after starting a company. Life got exponentially more complicated, making it impossible to track progress intuitively alone. I take the 50 minute workout classes, I count the miles, I track the conversions, I refresh the Dune TVL metrics hourly. (I ditched the Apple Watch.)
You can't build a company without an obsession with metrics and tracking them, which soon extends to every part of your life; you'll get lost in the sauce trying to move quickly along a complex multi-dimensional plane without them. And there's deep satisfaction to beating that data day after day if you're competitive to your core.
But there's still a ballerina in there somewhere with a reverence for intuition.
Originally published on X.