How will you measure your life?

If you could see a retrospective of your life metrics after you die, which metrics would you be most curious about?

No, this article is not a summary of Clayton M. Christensen's book of the same name, although I've also read it in the quest to find my own answers to this question.

It all started 5 years ago when I was talking to a Data Analyst friend about how cool it would be if, after you die, you were able to see a data summary about your life.

Think about the famous Spotify retrospective but with some info like:

• How much time do you spend listening to music during your whole life

• How does that compare to your friends and family

• How does that compare to your city or country's average

• A totally random fact you were not aware of such as "In all the days you listened to song X, you have also listened to song Y"

Now, expand this same idea to topics such as food, travel, series, video games, how many hours you spend laughing and crying, and the breakdown of the reasons for each.

The possibilities are endless!

I could spend months in the afterlife just having fun with all of these curiosities...

You don't need to die to find out

Fortunately for those who are curious but also passionate about living like I am, laws like GDPR, CCPA, and the LGPD in Brazil have made it mandatory for companies to disclose and share the data they have about you upon request.

I was so curious about the data companies had about me that I decided to request my data from the following providers:

• Spotify

• Netflix

• Whatsapp

• Google (YouTube, Maps, Location/GPS, Gmail, Agenda, Browser, Wallets, and other 40+ services)

• Instagram

• Others

My expectations were high, as a tech/data worker I know how much data a company can have from its users.

However, I can't avoid saying that I was completely amazed (and also a bit scared) about everything they know about me.

Google knows how much time I spent in each place, all the apps I opened on my Android, when and how much time I spent on each of them, all my browser and email history, and everything I watched or searched for on YouTube.

Despite the creepy side of it, there are a ton of interesting analyses we can make with the data these companies collect about us:

• Requesting my Spotify data, I could make my own retrospective, grouping data for all the years I've been using it together. Instead of having only 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 retrospectives separately, I was able to find my "favorite songs and artists of all time".

• Requesting my Netflix data, I found out that I've already watched 730 hours of content in the past 4 years. I was shocked as I didn't see myself as a heavy user, but it averages 30 minutes a day, which seems reasonable as I often watch a quick episode while eating at night.

I was so impressed with all of this that I even thought about creating an app that requests information from multiple sources on the user's behalf and creates beautiful-looking charts with insights about one's life.

Unfortunately, most of the providers take a few days to send data back which doesn't help the UX of my hypothetical app.

On the other hand, there are already some websites in which you can upload the data from the providers and get some insight back:

• Stats.fm and Receiptify are good examples that give user insights when connected to their Spotify account.

• Tinder Insights is a very interesting example as it gives you not only a summary of your data but how it compares to the average of users who have also uploaded theirs.

Example from the Tinder Insights website

A bold claim I want to make is there are a lot of books on self-knowledge but I believe none of them could beat big data.

If you really want to know yourself better, get the data big tech has from you and take a look at it.

No book author has what they do and it's all free.

How to sail in the Big Data Sea

Despite the fact that we will never have all the data about everything in our lives, we have more and more data about everything each day.

Beyond Spotify and Google, there will be more and more wearables, smart house accessories, IOT devices, etc.

So, back to our exercise, let's say that you could have access to almost all data about your life.

Where to start and where not to waste your time?

In the business world, there is the concept of KPIs, OPIs, and Informational Indicators.

Most people know only "KPI" and they use it indistinguishable as a synonym for an indicator or metric alone, completely ignoring the relevance of the "key" word in the acronym.

That's a poor and incomplete definition from a managerial perspective, so I will adopt the following:

• Key Performance Indicator: is the single metric that summarizes if a goal is being achieved or not.

• Operational Performance Indicator: it is a sub-metric related to a process linked to the KPI result.

• Informational Indicator: usually, indicators represent important numbers one wants to manage, which means taking action to drive the numbers up or down when they are out of the target. Informational means that this is not a managed number, but something that is nice to know anyway.

Now let's go from theory to practice with the gym example:

I see many Instagram stories with a picture in the gym and a caption such as "120/210", which makes me think the user is counting how many times he has checked in the gym in the numerator and his New Year's resolution goal in the denominator.

This is clearly an OPI example, as it's 100% about the process and indirectly linked to the end result they aim to achieve.

If your goal is to get stronger or lose weight, for example, the best KPI might be how many kilograms you are bench pressing or just your body weight.

Focusing on how much weight you are losing is the key thing, but if you are not obtaining results, then you can go one level deeper and check your OPIs:

• How many calories are you eating?

• How many calories are you spending?

• How many hours are you sleeping?

Finally, an example of an informational indicator could be simply the number of different exercises or meals you make during the day.

You can skip a meal if you eat enough calories in another, but maybe you want to track how many meals you have just in case someone asks you about it.

Out of the scope of the article, but can't avoid saying good KPI/OPIs must be as MECE as possible, both for successful business and personal strategies.

If you don't know what MECE is, google it!

To sum up, focusing on the KPIs alone, we can ignore all the other down in the hierarchy metrics and focus on a few ones to measure our life.

But, what now? How can we define the KPIs to measure the success of our lives?

Does this even make sense?

It is pretty clear to me that different people weigh things differently and have unique purposes. Therefore, there is nothing much I can say about what should be your life's KPIs.

However, I didn't want to easily give up on trying, so I started wondering if I could come up with metrics for the common things we all need and want: health, money, relationships, etc.

In this exercise, I realized that "health" and "money", for example, are just enablers for us to achieve other things.

We could come up with a bunch of health KPIs and OPIs, such as body weight, BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.

But all of these don't mean anything alone. If one has a health condition but can do everything that is important for him or her, is the issue or metric relevant?

The same can be said for money: it's just a means for us to do something else.

Dying with a lot of money is meaningless unless that money comes from generating value for others via products and services, which in this case might mean a great deal, not for the money itself, but by the contribution the owner had in the life of others.

The hard thing is, we could say the same about friendship, career, personal development, and all the other common life dimensions.

Perhaps your purpose is to travel the whole world and create content and that's why you need health, money, and adventurous friends.

Or maybe you are a politician and you need great health conditions, a lot of money, and great friends to make the world a better place.

After a lot of thinking, my conclusion is that it all boils down to one's purpose.

Given that we don't necessarily need to have a well-defined purpose, and that we could even have multiple purposes in different stages of life, this exercise is not getting any easier.

Some people would default to happiness as an answer, but they would be surprised to know that people have not always given happiness the same importance as we do in modern societies. The History of Happiness by Peter Stearns is a great read on this topic.

Metrics for society: making subjectivity go away

I could give up now, as the subjectivity problem imposes a challenge to define a set of metrics for how should we measure our lives.

However, I learned that when faced with this kind of blocker, it is possible to work around it by asking a slightly different question:

By updating our question to "How will we measure the success of our society?" instead of "How will we measure the success of our lives?", we remove subjectivity from the equation.

And, if we find out what makes a successful society, perhaps we can bring this as a sort of an answer to our initial question, given that we are part of the society and vice-versa.

So, thinking about a society as a country or even the entire human civilization, what makes a society successful?

Some key numbers could be:

• How long this society lasted

• How many people were part of it

• Achievements or how fast this society figured something out in comparison to other societies (like landing on the moon)

Metrics such as % of households with basic sanitation, average life expectancy, territorial extension, and the number of murderers could be seen as sub-metrics that impact the key numbers, similar to the KPIs/OPIs we talked about before.

But what's the point?

It doesn't really mean anything to me if human society will last for 10 million or 100 million years.

Perhaps that's not even something possible to claim, as the concept of "human" might evolve in sub-species during all of these years.

The more I think about metrics to measure my life, the less relevant they seem to be.

But as the metrics glow fades away, I begin to see something that was hidden behind it: the importance of the journey.

How to measure the journey

So far, my way of thinking brought me to a similar conclusion as other authors: the whole movie is more important than a single picture.

The movie about a self-made millionaire who made it out of nowhere is likely to sell more tickets than a man with a successful business inherited from his family, despite the fact that their "pictures" might look the same.

This rationale motivated me for my final attempt to come up with metrics to measure my own life.

It's still subjective, but I will share part of my personal conclusions as a way to help you figure out yours.

When I think about my journey, I realize not trying feels way worse to me than failing, for example:

• I might fail to learn how to kite-surf, but I have been trying for the past 2 years whenever I'm visiting a beach town and I had a lot of fun doing it.

• I might fail to start my own business and change the world somehow, but I just know I have to try.

• I might receive a no from someone when asking for something, but I will never know until I try to.

So, one key metric for me is the percentage of times I gave up on something without even trying, and I want that to be as close to 0 as possible.

Another metric is the percentage of time I spent on things I actually wanted to do, not that I had to because of work (the boring part at least) or other obligations.

These metrics are somewhat related to one of the "Top 5 Regrets of The Dying", a book written by a nurse who took care of patients on their final days:

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

I definitely recommend the read.

Finally, a key metric I would like to know is in what percentile I'm in for different dimensions in life, in contrast to myself in other universes.

Sounds crazy, right?

Perhaps what's really crazy is that I'm always thinking about it. Let me explain:

Suppose you could run a Monte Carlo simulation on your life and you are now able to see what happened to 10.000 versions of you. How does your current version compare to the others?

Am I among the 10% happiest versions of myself? Or perhaps the top 25% best careers I could have?

If so, what did I do well and what could I have done better that justifies the difference between the results?

This is an exercise I often find useful to some personal decision-making.

If you want to go even crazier, you can even think about what the other versions of yourself would think.

For example: maybe you are too pessimistic in all the universes, and then you always think you are worse than your other versions. Sort of like the neighbor's grass is always greener problem but in such a way you are your own neighbor from another dimension.

How does it change your self-perception now?

Pushing society to become more journey-focused

We do judge books by their covers because it works.

It might not always work, but is not even feasible to find out all the details and "watch everyone's movies" instead of taking a look at their "pictures".

However, we should encourage it as much as we can, even fostering public policies that support journey-focused cultures.

The main reason for this is to incentivize people to act in a way that can benefit our entire society.

Let's take a simple example:

Most people and cultures will agree that stealing is not a good thing, but can we really blame someone who stole something to avoid starvation?

Staying true to your values is only possible when you have a real choice.

Something similar can be said about wives who don't leave abusive husbands because of financial dependence, or even people who want to quit their jobs to do something more meaningful but can't because they have bills to pay (provided nothing can be done about reducing expenses).

One of my key takeaways from the Bullshit Jobs book is that UBI - Universal Basic Income, could provide the minimum safety for millions of people to have the freedom to focus on their journey.

I'm not necessarily a supporter, but think it's an idea worth investigating.

Public policies that go against privatizing gains and socializing losses should also be fostered in favor of a more rational distribution of gains.

Remember our Monte Carlo simulation? Imagine that in all of your 10.000 lives, you always try to start a new business.

It's unlikely that you will give birth to an unicorn in all of them, but perhaps you made it once or twice.

What does this tell about you? Not much.

There are a ton of random things that can happen or not that would influence your success, but are not related to your actions.

As Malcolm Gladwell points out in Outliers, Bill Gates is definitely a legend but is highly likely that if he hadn't invented Microsoft someone else would have come up with something similar in the coming years.

The same is true for electricity, the Internet, and probably everything else you can think of.

For one entrepreneur to succeed, many have to try.

Obviously, there are good and bad entrepreneurs. Not all of us are like Bill Gates, but among the good ones, there are also the lucky and unlucky ones.

(And we are not even talking about all the people who didn't even have the opportunity to start a business in their 10k lives).

So if a venture were successful, and a higher portion of its gains found a way back to society lowering the burden, risks, and costs of the "good but unlucky" entrepreneurs, this would further incentivize entrepreneurial activity.

If that happens, we as individuals could benefit not only from more innovation but also from a fairer society with less inequality and a better mental health index, without the pressure to "make our picture look good" but instead focusing on giving our best every day to solve the challenges we believe are meaningful to build a better world.

After all the reflections, book recommendations, and even public policy proposals, I hope you have enjoyed the journey of reading this and that it somehow helps you figure out how to measure your life and achieve it.