Numbers Matter: How Will You Crush Your Goals This Year?
18:28 – the number on her tile, the number on her heart and the number that fueled long practices, sore muscles and mental exhaustion.
During her first season running cross country as a sixth grader, my daughter ran an 18:28 in her first two-mile race. If you are a cross country enthusiast, you know that’s not a great time. But she fell in love with the sport and over the years, she kept setting goals and improving her time. During eighth grade, she placed 14th at state, just missing her goal of a 12-minute, 2-mile race.
She was discouraged – not at the race she ran, but that she missed the number on her tile (her goal for the state race). While some of her teammates broke their tile – “crushing their goal” – she took hers home and set it on her shelf as a reminder to keep chasing that goal.
COVID took away their state meet as a freshman. So, as a sophomore, she was pretty determined to break her high school tile. Her goal was steep, but her coach encouraged her to set it anyway. She wrote 18:28 on her tile – an attempt to break her first race time – not in two miles, but in three.
She’s part of an excellent team that qualified for state easily. All season she ran in the 19s, which was admirable, but far from 18:28.
When the gun went off at the state meet, I couldn’t help but think of how important numbers are to help us reach our goals. No matter how the race went, I knew she was better because she had her sight on a goal that could be measured.
When she crossed the finish line at 18:23, I remember running into her coach and sharing how excited I was for her that she could finally break her tile. I quickly excused my “proud mom moment” with a “not that it’s about times” comment because I know every course is different and it’s about where you finish as a placing that matters for the team.
Coach looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Numbers do matter. Don’t underestimate that.”
You Can’t Improve What You Can’t Measure
I've thought about her comment a lot since then. It’s so true that we can’t improve what we can’t measure. I heard this time and time again at the National Swine Improvement Federation meeting from world-renowned geneticists. If we don’t know where we are at, we can’t get better.
Tami Brown-Brandl of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shared how she is utilizing real-time data on individual animals to aid management decisions. Precision animal management won’t replace caretakers, she emphasized, but it will help caretakers make better decisions.
Numbers matter significantly to our industry. If you haven’t signed up to do an On-Farm Sustainability Report, click on the links below to see how two pig farmers are using the information they’ve learned from these reports to make their operations more profitable and valuable in a changing marketplace.
Numbers helped Dale Stevermer evaluate how changes he made to his operation have affected his farm’s overall sustainability.
“We need baseline numbers so we can strive for continuous improvement; and that is what the industry has built itself on throughout the past 50-60 years,” Stevermer says.
Randy Spronk says numbers help us measure progress.
“If we don't measure it, you can’t improve it. I am looking forward to seeing how changes we’ve made in the past year impact our On-Farm Sustainability Report in 2021,” he says.
Spencer Wayne, DVM, recently shared why he and his team developed the Pipestone Antibiotic Resistance Tracker to measure antibiotic use.
“If the idiom is true that ‘you cannot improve what you cannot measure,’ then simply measuring use is foundational to making better decisions going forward,” Wayne says.
Our industry is known for its benchmarking and use of numbers to make progress. What kind of goals do you have for your operation in 2022? We’d love to hear from you about what you are setting your sights on. I can’t wait to hear about your broken tiles in the year ahead.
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