the Practical Skateboarder

Unlike traditional sports and athletics that are highly systematized, skateboarding lacks a structure that a beginner (or even advanced) skateboarder can follow to consistently improve.

So, I’d like to introduce another concept to skateboarding as a component of a framework for getting better faster.

Objectives and Key Results. (For more on this, see What Matters)

While the system was developed for companies like Intel to deliver greater performance year-over-year, I found that it naturally applies to skateboarding and provides a simple structure for defining goals and tracking progress that skateboarding lacks.

The idea is simple. Define the Objective you’d like to achieve and the Key Results that you measure to track whether or not you have achieved that Objective.

A good Objective is something challenging that you’d like to accomplish and can be easily understood. Useful Key Results are quantitative and objectively measure your progress toward the Objective.

For example, consider a beginner skateboarder who has learned to ollie and now wants to learn to kickflip. The Objective is obvious—learn to kickflip. What does it mean to “learn” to kickflip though? Is landing the trick one time the same as being able to do the trick most of the time? This is up to the individual to decide on what they mean by “learn” in this case. To make the Objective easy to understand, let’s say that “learn the trick” means that you can consistently land the kickflip 5 times out of 10 for a 50% success rate. Now we’ve got a specific Key Result to go with our Objective—that is, land kickflips with a 50% success rate. The beginner can now track their progress over time, keeping track of how many times the trick was attempted and how many times the trick was landed. Tracking the ratio of attempts landed to attempts taken and seeing if the ratio is increasing with regular practice will provide direct feedback about the rate of improvement, effectiveness of the approach, and whether or not the Objective has been achieved.

The biggest waste of time I experienced while trying to get better at skateboarding was a lack of focus. Each time I’d go skateboarding, the tricks I’d want to learn would change. Setting Objectives though forces you to define what it is you’re working on specifically and keep track of whether or not you’re accomplishing what you’ve set out to do.

Pick one Objective, define your Key Results, and then focus on accomplishing your Objective for a few hours each day. Make it the first thing you do. For everything else you might want to learn, write it down and make it the next Objective once you’ve accomplished what you’re working on right now.

The advantage of the Objective and Key Results framework is that it forces you to focus on getting better (by defining what you want to achieve) and to take consistent action toward achieving your goal.