Name: What Happened When I Started Measuring My Life Every Day | Chris Musser | TED
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T21:37:42.000Z
Duration: 10 min 27 s
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Modal verbs - A2

The imperative

If you use a wearable Fitbit or a Apple watch, track your health.

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.

And 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.

And so with her voice in my mind, I would basically answer the question, yeah, I am going to live a good life.

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.

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 honestly, I looked and I was fine, but I wasn't thriving.

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 50 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%?

And so there's one thing that we love and believe deeply.

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 mattered 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.

then I brought in insights from the thinkers who've 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's research on happiness, to this global flourishing study and this cool article by my colleagues at BCG called Strategize youe 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 kind of the point because from the ancients to the moderns, these ingredients have been remarkably consistent.

I had the privilege of working for Gallup for a few years, if 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 20ish 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.

But these to me basically are the picture of the good life to me.

And so for the past 18 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 90 seconds.

But folks, this has been a total game changer for me.

My therapists have told me I have multiple therapists simultaneously, which I hear is not best practice.

But here's what they agree on, which is I have a lot of cognitive distortions.

Some of you have them and you're like, yeah, I got some of those too.

Thinking, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, right?

Like when you pop up the news and you discover the sky is falling.

I was prepping 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.

And both of them told me, I kid you not, without consulting with each other.

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 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.

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

cognitive

sort

discipline

tough