The Invisible Data Points
Maybe, if I had been collecting data throughout my karate journey, it would look something like this.
Or maybe it would look nothing like this at all.
The visualization above isn't real. I didn't track every hour I spent in class or practicing at home. I don't have a record of every technique I learned, every failed attempt, every injury or setback. I certainly didn't assign a value to my confidence each week or record every moment I felt frustrated, nervous, encouraged, or proud.
Those are imagined data points.
And that's partly why I wanted to create the visualization.
We tend to think that if something happened, there must be data somewhere that can tell us the story. Sometimes there is. But not every journey leaves behind a dataset, and not all progress produces evidence that can be neatly counted, categorized, or plotted on a chart.
Some of the most important parts of our lives happen without anyone measuring them.
This weekend, I broke boards and passed my test for recommended black belt.
There is a video of the board break, and I love it. It captures one of those moments you want to hold onto—the nerves beforehand, the concentration, and then the instant when my foot hits the boards and they break. After nearly two years of karate, it feels like evidence of how far I've come.
But I've watched it a few times now, and I've started thinking about everything the video doesn't show.
It doesn't show my first class as a white belt or what it felt like to start something completely new. It doesn't show all the ordinary classes between white, yellow, orange, lime green, green, blue, purple, red and brown. It doesn't show practicing at home, repeating something that wasn't working, getting corrected, trying again, or finally realizing that something my instructors had been telling me for weeks suddenly made sense.
The video captures a few seconds.
The journey that created those few seconds took nearly two years.
Maybe because I spend so much of my life working with data, I can't help but wonder what I would see if I could visualize everything that happened in between.
Some of it would be easy to measure: hours in class, hours practicing at home, tests, techniques, belt promotions and board breaks.
But those aren't the data points I'm most curious about.
I'd want to see how many times I failed at something before I learned how to do it. How many corrections it took before a movement became instinct. How often my confidence dipped even though I was still improving. How many times I walked into class nervous, left frustrated, or wondered why I wasn't better at something yet.
I'd want to capture the people, too—the friendships formed along the way, the instructors who saw what I couldn't, the encouragement that came at exactly the right time, and the people who made me laugh on days when I needed it.
There is no dataset for any of that. And I think that's what has stayed with me. So much of life is measured by the things we can see.
The diploma. The new job. The promotion. The finished project. The race time. The house key. The black belt.
We have evidence of those moments, so they become the markers we use to tell the story.
But the moment we call success is usually just the moment something that has been accumulating for a long time finally becomes visible.
Anyone who works with data knows that the number at the top of a dashboard rarely tells the whole story. Eventually, someone asks why? Then we have to go underneath it. We look at individual records, investigate the outliers, add context, and ask what might be missing.
Maybe we should give ourselves—and other people—the same curiosity.
Behind the promotion may be the projects that failed, the feedback that hurt before it helped, the mentor who opened a door, and the risk someone almost didn't take. Behind the person confidently doing something they're good at may be a long stretch when they weren't very good at it at all. Behind the finished work may be twenty versions no one else ever saw.
Those moments rarely make it into the picture at the end.
But they're still part of the data.
When I watch my board-breaking video now, I still see the moment everyone else sees. My foot hits the boards, and they break.
But I also see nearly two years that aren't actually visible in the frame.
I see the first class. The belts that came before this one. The hours of practice. The mistakes and injuries. The nerves. The friendships. The people who taught me. The things that went right and the things that didn't.
And I see all those completely ordinary days when nothing remarkable happened except that I showed up.
There isn't a dataset that can reconstruct all of that. And maybe there doesn't need to be.
The board breaking is visible.
The belt is visible.
But they are only the moments when something that had been accumulating quietly finally became something everyone else could see.
The milestone is one data point. The story is everything underneath it.
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