Tracking Life Metrics Failed

A story about a developer named Felix who conducted an extensive personal data tracking experiment while living a minimalist lifestyle.

"This guy tracked 100 different parts of his life for 8 years. He tracked the easy ones like weight, steps, and diet, but then also tracked his mood, stress, and used an app called Rescue Time that tracked which programs he was using on his computer. He monitored how much time he spent on his cell phone, his mood, energy, sleep, how many texts he sent, how often he talked to friends, if he was more productive in evening or day, if he took drugs, what city he was in, what the weather was, how hungry he felt, if he felt lethargic or stressed.

He had 30-40-50,000 data points done in an engineer way. He could say things like 'I was 46% more likely to say I felt sad if I didn't see a friend in the trailing 3 days.'

His story is incredibly interesting. He moved from Vienna to San Francisco in 2015 to work at Twitter. After a year he decided he didn't like having an apartment and would only live in Airbnbs in San Francisco. Then he left San Francisco altogether and for the past 7 years he's only owned a suitcase - that's how he's been living.

At the end of it all, he concluded that while he was happy he did it as a way to nerd out, it wasn't beneficial and doesn't make sense for anyone else to do this."

10:00 - 14:20
Full video: 51:53
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Sam Parr

Host of MFM and fitness influencer

Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.

In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.

Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.

After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.

Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.

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