Alex Bakula-Davis @AlexBakulaDavis: What are your thoughts on the “quantified self” and how it could help change industries other than health (education, business)?
ANSWER:
Introduction: Quantified Self, please meet Real Self.
The quantified self means measuring every aspect of your life to see what you can improve. There is nothing wrong with this. When I was a daytrader I wrote software to analyze my profit and loss statement on each day of the week, on every hour. Trades in the afternoon were net-losers for me. Trades on Mondays were loser. Trades that I made outside of my system were losers. I studied myself by quantifying my work.
But better is to do what I suggest above: check the boxes on physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. It doesn’t mean you have to meditate 20 hours a day and lift 200 lbs. Just check the box. Make sure you are paying small attention to the holistic “you”. Somewhere in there is the “real self”. The real self will see all of its quantified statistics improve, and then some, as a result.
The Real Self makes the Quantified Self look like a little boy who doesn’t know how to drink without a straw.
The problem with the quantified self is that you are taking bits and pieces of yourself and analyzing them to death. But when the real self is healthy then you will automatically know what to do how to integrate the disparate parts to make a better you.
For intance, in my example above, what I really should’ve done was not analyze my P&L but should’ve started eating more fruit and stopped trading altogether.