The only before-and-after I kept

I've taken the before photos. Everyone has. Then you look at them six months later and they mostly document a bad camera angle and a bad mood.

What I kept is a page with two columns and six rows. Starting, three months, six, nine, twelve, fifteen. Four numbers per column, and a single line of comment per column, written by a person who knew what had happened that quarter.

Twelve lines. I can read the whole two years in about ninety seconds, which is the only way I've ever been able to see a trend.

Photos show you a shape. The page shows you a direction, and the direction is the part that changes a person's mind about staying.

I also keep it for a slightly petty reason: on the day I decided to keep going, it had my coach's handwriting on it and that felt like proof that somebody had been paying attention.

Everyone talks about progress photos because they're visual. Nobody talks about the artifact that's actually readable, and readable is what survives.

MOJOWAY's quarterly page is designed to be the thing a client still has in five years, which mostly means short, dated, and honest.