Who is really competing in the health tracking market? Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings, Xiaomi, and Apple? Or, are we competing with the devices themselves, trying to figure out how to use them best?

If you own a health tracker you know how hard it is to make deep sense of your data. Aside from step goals, there really isn’t anything impressive about them. If you don’t own a health tracker, it’s probably because of the aforementioned reason.

As if that weren’t bad enough, health tracking is expensive. It requires an upfront investment that isn’t obviously justifiable. Personally, I dished out $159 for the Withings Cardio Scale, $300 for the Apple Watch, and $99 for the Fibit Flex 2. They are nothing more than tools…expensive tools that beginners find frustratingly hard to find long-lasting value in.

In fact, I would compare the “hobby” of health tracking to golf. The upfront investment of buying clubs can be pricey. Generally, an inexperienced golfer has no fun learning golf and will quit the sport altogether after a couple of attempts.

But, just like the sport of golf, we can learn the fundamentals of health tracking from the pros, the people who really understand what this data is good for.

First, we must understand that simply buying the tools isn’t enough; they are just the foundation for a concept known as the Quantified Self. Essentially, the Quantified Self is an evolution of the modern human being that has transformed their subjective, daily rituals and feelings into quantifiable data that can be analyzed for better understanding of their own life. The Quantified Self brings clarity to health, fitness, productivity, lifestyle, etc…

By transforming the subjective nature of daily life into objective numbers, individuals can look at their own habits from the outside looking in, making changes that are necessary to an overall healthier existence.

Uncovering your Quantified Self is a daunting task, though. It is a formidable opponent that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Many have tried, some have stuck with it, and few have any time to tell the story of how they tamed this beast.

The Inevitable Human is my story, an ongoing process of capturing my Quantified Self — so that you can learn from my mishaps and successes, and inspire you to do the same.

One month in, I’ve found that the hardest part of this daunting mission is making my data uniquely mine. Obviously the data is “mine”, since it comes from my lifestyle. But, the Fitbit interface hasn’t been able to grow with me — progressing as my Quantified Self evolves. Don’t get me wrong, it is good for beginners, but after inputting my information, I can’t help but feel like just another number. All the goals are generic, they haven’t progressed as I’ve easily surpassed the daily 10,000 steps.

After researching other interfaces, I stumbled across Gyroscope, an operating system for the human body — which aggregates all the data from your wearable sensors. My first reaction was that this is a tool that will grow alongside me, offering new possibilities as I change habits, add new data tracking to the mix, and begin to understand my Quantified Self.

Now that I’ve been tracking my data for a month, and have been able to use Gyroscope’s customizable interface to begin analyzing insights, I’ve stumbled across something I never knew about myself.

By tracking my health data, I’ve realized how many places I haven’t been. Not in the sense of traveling, but rather with my daily routine. On a daily basis, I average over 14,000 steps. Yet, in all of April, I only visited 42 different places.