What Happened When I Started Measuring My Life Every Day | Chris Musser | TED

Can I get a show of hands if you use a wearable? Fitbit, Aura, Apple Watch, Track Your Health, come on. Okay. Okay. It's like 50% of you.

I love this. So my question for us today, for you but also the non wearables, is what if we expanded from not just measuring our health, but to measuring all the important parts of our lives? So this really started for me right after I turned 25 and I started to wake up in the middle of the night pretty consistently with these panics. A lot of folks wake up with to do lists bouncing through their minds, a lot of you maybe, some of you. I had to do lists, but I also had this major to be list.

Really just, will I be a good man? Will I live a good life? And I'm I'm a pretty insecure guy generally, but I have this thing, I have one of those extremely encouraging moms, which maybe some of you have, mine is very likely more encouraging. And so with her voice in my mind, I would basically answer the question, yeah, I am gonna live a good life. In fact, maybe she's right, I will change millions of lives, maybe I'll be president.

So I had this narrative from '25 to about '33, and then I hit 33 and I haven't changed that many lives. And I find out one day that Bill Clinton was already a governor by '33, which to most of you is no big deal, but as my wife, Ashley, that broke me. I think what happened is it kind of shattered this sort of mom induced megalomania I had and it made me take an actual look at my life. And so I looked at my professional life, but then what about my friendships? What about my contributions to society?

What about my character? And honestly, I looked and I was fine, but I wasn't thriving, I wasn't flourishing. And so then it struck me, you know, Chris, a lot of people don't live good lives. Why do you think you would automatically be any different? What if I wake up in fifty years and I discover I have not become the man I wanted to be?

I'm guessing some of you have similar thoughts because Gallup tells us that only 33% of us are thriving in life. So if you're in the other 66%, like me, how do we get into the 33%? Now, I'm a management consultant and so there's one thing that we love and believe deeply. Say it with me if you know it, what gets measured gets managed. Come on, guys, you know this.

You know, what is it? 50% of us use wearables to measure our health, to presumably manage it, but I couldn't find anything like that to measure all the dimensions that matter in life. So I created this super simple, kind of clunky excel tracker that I use. So the first step was to identify the dimensions of a good life. So I started with my faith, but then I brought in insights from the thinkers who studied this stuff.

So from Aristotle to the thing called the Harvard Happiness Study to Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology to Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life to my professor Arthur Brooks' research on happiness to this global flourishing study and this cool article by my colleagues at BCG called Strategize Your Life. And so I landed on these nine dimensions of the good life for me. You're seeing these and you're like, pretty obvious, right? Which is which is kind of the point because from the ancients to the moderns, these ingredients have been remarkably consistent, they're knowable. So step two, measure.

I had the privilege of working for Gallup for a few years. Do you know them? And so I have this nerdy thing where I love building surveys. So I turned these nine dimensions into kind of a 20 ish question survey that I answer pretty much every day. Now, these are the questions.

I have a few others I answer weekly, like contribution to society. That's sort of a weekly thing for me. My mom thinks it's daily, it's not. But these to me basically are the picture of the good life to me. And so, for the past eighteen months, I've essentially answered these questions every day.

I do it at 9PM on my couch, on my phone, and it literally takes me ninety seconds. But folks, this has been a total game changer for me. My therapists have told me, I I have multiple therapists simultaneously, which I hear is not best practice, but here's what they agree on, which is that I have a lot of cognitive distortions. So you know these things, right? Some of you have them and you're like, yeah, I got some of those too.

So these are things like all or nothing thinking, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, right? Like when you pop up the news and you discover the sky is falling. So for me, I had this I was prepping with this TED talk a month ago and I was already in pretty good shape, I thought. And so I sent a recording of myself to some mentors and I said, you know, love some feedback. You know, I was asking for, like, positive feedback.

But then two of them responded pretty quickly and they said, Chris, thanks. Maybe we should talk. Yeah. And so we talked and both of them told me, I kid you not, without consulting with each other, the talk was, was fine, but it was a little bit dramatic and at the same time, somehow, a little bit flat, which if you're like me, that sent me spiraling. So I what I did, I kid you, I went into a dark room in the office right after my calls and I pulled out my phone and I journaled about all the ways in which I am defective across dimensions of life.

So yeah, public speaker, obviously bad, but what about at work? Not good enough. Husband? Not good enough. Friend?

Bad. Told you I was insecure. But see, this is where my brain takes me, but the tracker really helps with this. So here's one week in May. Picture my tracker.

And this is a particularly tough Monday. A lot of kind of low scores, not many high scores. So I fill this one out and my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, my life is falling apart. But then, I take a step back and I notice that my Sunday was fine, pretty good. My Saturday was good, and then I keep going and sure enough, Chris, I just had one bad day.

And the therapists are right. I have the emotional stability of a theater kid. You know, for months, Mondays would hit me super hard. Anybody hate Mondays? Two people hate Mondays.

Well, I hate Mondays. And so these are my scores on Mondays. Several Mondays over the course of a few months, I get low scores across dimensions. I don't love my wife well, I pout at her, she calls me pouty pants sometimes. I I didn't do well at work, I felt stressed, I handled my emotions poorly, I didn't eat well.

But then, here's the thing, I noticed this pattern, which is the Mondays were typically bad, but this Monday storm always passes, usually by Tuesday or Wednesday, which shifts how I think about Mondays, right, because there's a fundamental difference between a tough day when you project it out into eternity, as I often do, and a bad day when you already know the end of the story. You know, I also get tunnel vision, especially at work. My wife is a big logistics gal, and I am not a big logistics guy. So she'll text me at work for logistics, this one time she did this for twelve and a half hours straight. And I saw I saw all the text, I didn't see see the text.

Right? I didn't answer, and so she knows me, and so she sent me this calendar invitation to my work email, and I responded in thirty seconds. So that's not just this bad habit, it's really my my default to reduce myself to one dimension, especially work. Anyone else? But the tracker helps with that too.

So here's a great week at work. Crushed it. But then spiritually, kind of off. And then I look at other dimensions and I started out the week strong, but then I kind of fell apart. See, the tracker visually reminds me that the good life is not just one dimension.

In doing this every night, it forces my brain to optimize across dimensions to balance the trade offs and to adjust my focus when needed. You know, I'll probably never forget, I was sitting on in a cabin in Mounted, North Carolina. It was 9PM one day, and I was filling out my tracker on vacation, and it struck me that night for some reason that my my loving Ashley question had been flashing red at me for months. And the other dimensions were basically green. I was doing fine.

And for some reason that night, it it it struck me, Chris, this is not the promise you made Ashley on your wedding day. This is this is not what you said to her. Is this the way you wanna look back on your life that you had a good career, but you neglected the one relationship that you claim is the most important to you? That is not the good life. That is a wasted life.

That is a failed life. And that hit me super hard, so I I made some changes. And sure enough, within a few months, things started to shift. The scores were improving, but my wife noticed. And I I often wonder if I hadn't had the tracker, how long would it have taken me to get this wake up call?

Okay. So at this point, some of you are into this, some of you are like, this is fine for you, but I'm not that like disciplined or I don't like that much system, I don't like Excel. So I get that, but here's the thing, I love filling out my tracker. And I don't think it's because I'm a consultant and I like Excel, I do like Excel, but it's because I feel myself becoming a more full human. But I am a consultant, so I did build you three versions of my tracker.

The light, medium, heavy, so you can download these and actually measure your lives tonight. You know, I still wake up sometimes at 3AM, but now I don't really panic anymore. I know I'm managing the full picture of my life because I'm measuring it. And I'd invite you join me because the life you measure just might be the good life. Thank you.