The less productive person would also benefit from measuring against themselves. On a day-to-day basis, there are no metrics that make more sense.
(Or not measure at all, which is fine -- but if you do measure something, that's what you should be measuring)
> A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves.
I think that is doing the author a disservice. My read is not that he measured his self against top performers per se, rather he happened to observe his performance relative to others and it was a wake up call that allowed for the self reflection that is necessary to improve.
Carmack doesn't measure his productivity against someone else. He measures, with the "CD player trick", against himself.
A less productive person, like the author, measures against the top performers. But the top performers measure against themselves. This is the real insight of this article for me (maybe not even the author realized it).