Know thyself. Through numbers.

You’re constantly creating data, whether you measure them or not. A decision not to collect data is itself a data point. With self-tracking, people capture their useful data to discover improvement opportunities and truths hidden in plain sight.

Ray Charles once said, “The notes are right underneath your fingers. You just gotta take the time to hit the right notes.”¹⁰

Similarly, the data is always there. We just gotta take the time to identify, collect, and act on what’s valuable—to hit the right notes.

Caveat: In an ideal world, the things we’d measure and optimize for are feelings: love, enthusiasm, creativity, etc. Perhaps, one day, there will be biometric tools to codify and measure these emotions in our brains—or, if Elon Musk and Neuralink have anything to do about it, create those feelings on demand.¹¹ Today, our self-tracking efforts are better spent on things we can directly quantify, like time spent meditating, which contributes to feelings of love, enthusiasm, and creativity.

Principle #2: KNOW THYSELF THROUGH NUMBERS

Self-knowledge is crucial to understand where you are, where you’re going, and your capabilities to bridge the gap.

Historical strategies for improving self-knowledge (like journaling) are primarily subjective. By subjective, I mean relying on qualitative—often biased—interpretations of events.

As discussed in books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational, many cognitive heuristics prevent people from experiencing reality objectively. For example, illusory superiority compels most people to impossibly mark their performance as above average.¹²

So, what’s new about self-tracking? Its immediate addition to value by reinforcing the pursuit of self-knowledge with objectivity, helping lift the cloud of human bias.

Don’t misunderstand me: I believe quantitative AND qualitative methods for knowing yourself are valuable. I journal every morning. It’s just that most people entirely skip the quantitative.

My question is: Why does self-tracking make people more uncomfortable than journaling?

I think it’s because unfiltered data reveal the fallibility of humans—that we are prone to making errors in decision making and acting irrationally. In other words, the data challenges our ego.

Deborah Lupton, the author of The Quantified Self, advances this point:

“For some people, self-tracking may be a sign of weakness, of inability to engage in self-management without technological assistance.”¹³

My take: The most successful people of the future will work with technology to achieve unprecedented levels of wealth, health, and free time. There’s no room for ego on this accelerated path to personal freedom.

Another reason people avoid self-tracking? The feedback can be uncomfortable, especially when the data indicates incongruence between our actions and identities (a psychological state known as cognitive dissonance).

In the words of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful, and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.”¹⁴

Let’s refuse the soma¹⁵ and press on. 

Principle #3: BOUNDED RATIONALITY

The behavioral economics term of bounded rationality¹⁶ explains that we base our best decisions on the information available to us.

Let’s bring this to life with an example.

Imagine you’re an unknown author, and you’re about to release your first book. You know that choosing a good book title and cover design will be crucial to getting sales traction. There are two approaches (although you may only be familiar with one of them):

• Go with your intuition and pick the one that looks the coolest
• Split test several options using Google Ads

One such author chose #2, statistically raising his odds of success. That book sold over two million copies. Thus, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss became an international best-seller.¹⁷

In the words of HBR journalist Howie Jacobsen about Ferriss’ original title for that book, “it’s hard to imagine Broadband and White Sand generating the same buzz.”

The critical thing to note: If you didn’t know about marketing techniques like split testing, Option 1 would have seemed an entirely rational decision.

So, what do you think is the most frequent cause of suboptimal decisions? It’s limited information.

Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems, sums this nicely: “Decision-makers can’t respond to information they don’t have.”¹⁸

Think about it: Why would anybody wish to be wrong? Everybody is trying to be right. The gap between wanting and being is often one of information.

Meadows writes, “It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.”¹⁹ 

The bottom line: Self-tracking expands the limits of our bounded rationality. Our next principle dives deeper into self-tracking’s underlying mechanism of feedback loops.  

Principle #4: FEEDBACK LOOPS

“Dad, can we please just use the GPS?” This is a common debate during a family car ride.

If you’re like me, you want to use the GPS and know you took the wrong exit AS SOON AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

You can think of feedback like a GPS, course-correcting when you stray off the path and alerting you when you’re on the quickest route.

In Thinking in Systems, Meadows shares a fascinating study in which homes that had visible energy meters in the front entryway rather than in the basement consumed one third less energy.²⁰

Why did this happen? The energy meters in the front entryway provided owners feedback on their energy use. That feedback helped shape and guide future behaviors of greater efficiency.

You see, feedback is crucial to know whether you are making progress. It turns out that knowing you are making progress is wildly motivating. As Daniel Pink, author of Drive, shares: “The single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work.”²¹ (I think we can agree that building the best version of ourselves is a meaningful and badass endeavor.)

Let me explain this dynamic of feedback and motivation further.

Knowing that you are making progress leads to motivation, which you’ll likely reinvest in the same activity, empowering you to improve even further. This reinforcing loop is known as a virtuous cycle.

As I mentioned earlier, the pursuit of self-knowledge is not new. What’s new are the measurement tools available to us that enhance self-knowledge through feedback. These smart devices enable, track, and reinforce positive habits.

I refer to this emerging category of positive habit-building devices as habitech.

One example of habitech: HidrateSpark, a smart water bottle that automatically tracks my daily hydration. The base of the bottle subtly glows to remind me to drink more water in real time. Its mobile app gamifies the experience showing a dial with markers of current intake vs. recommended pace. (And, like Google maps, you better believe I’m trying to beat that ETA!)

What’s most interesting here is using technology to track performance automatically. Stick with me because this is crucial.

Historically, one constraint of self-tracking is that it takes too much time. Most people are too lazy (or too busy) and can’t be bothered. In the words of Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins: “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”²²

Here is one area in which I see habitech taking personal development to an unprecedented level: providing people timely and accurate information with little or no extra effort. The inevitable result? Better decisions.

Curious to learn more about habitech? I write extensively about this emerging category of products in my Superhuman Trends Report [2022].

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” —Peter Sondergaard

“Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.” —G. I. Gurdjieff

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” —Aristotle (attributed)

“If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” —Aldous Huxley

“Understanding patterns in one’s life is the starting point for making changes on the basis of these observations, and new digital technologies support this endeavor.” —Deborah Lupton

“The data derived from self-tracking appear to offer at least some degree of certainty, which one’s own perceptions cannot attain, and a relatively high degree of control over the messiness and unpredictability of the fleshly body” —Deborah Lupton

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” —Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO

“In God we trust, all others bring data.” —W. Edwards Deming

“The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn’t know before.” —Hilary Mason