TED Talks Daily - What happened when I started scoring my life every day | Chris Musser

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Can you measure a "good life?" Management consultant Chris Musser set out to answer this question for himself, developing a daily tracker to monitor progress across nine dimensions, from faith and relationships to work and wellbeing. Learn how it helped him focus on what really matters — and how you can adopt this 90-second habit, too.Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Living a fulfilling life starts with tracking what truly matters. In this talk, personal metrics expert Chris Musser shares how he turned a single question. Am I living a good life into a daily practice? Tracking progress across nine dimensions, from faith and relationships to work and well-being. By measuring his life. life each day, Chris tells us how he learned to spot the patterns and balance the tradeoffs that

can help any of us focus on what truly matters. Can I get a show of hands if you use a wearable? Fitbit, Ura, Apple Watch, track your health. Come on. Okay, okay. It's like 50% of you. I love this. 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 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, but I also had this major to-be list. Really just, will I be a good man? I live a good life. 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, mine is very likely more encouraging. And so with her voice in my mind, I would basically answer the question, yeah, I am going to live a good life. In fact, maybe she's right, I will change millions of lives. Maybe I'll be president. 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, But ask my wife, Ashley, that broke me. I think what happened is it kind of shattered this sort of mom-induced megalomani I had.

And it made me take an actual look at my life. And so I looked at my professional life, but then what about my friendships? What about my contributions to society? What about my character? And honestly, I looked and I was fine, but I wasn't thriving. I wasn't flourishing. And so then it struck me, 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%? Now, I am a management consultant. And so there's one thing that we love and believe deeply. Say it with me if you know it, well, gets measured, gets managed. Come on, guys, you know this. You know, what is it? 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

life. So I started with my faith, but 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 Your Life. And so I landed on these nine dimensions of the good life for me. From the ancients to the moderns, these ingredients have been remarkably consistent. They're knowable. So step two, measure. 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 20-ish question survey that I answer pretty much every day. I have a few others I answer weekly, like contribution to society. That's sort of a weekly thing for me. My mom thinks it's daily. It's not. 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 9 p.m. 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 Here is not best practice, but here's what they agree on, which is I have a lot of cognitive distortions. So you know these things, right? Some of you have them. You're like, yeah, I got some of those too.

So these are things like all and nothing thinking, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, right? Like when you pop up the news and you discover the sky is falling. So for me, I had this, I was prepping with 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. I was asking for like positive feedback. But then two of them responded pretty quickly and they said, Chris, thanks. Maybe we should talk. Yeah. And so we talked and both of them told me, I kid you not, without consulting with each other, the talk was fine, but 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 know, 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. So yeah, public speaker, obviously bad, but what about at work? Not good enough. Husband, not good enough. Friend? Bad? Told you I was insecure. But see, this is where my brain takes me, but the tracker really helps with this. So here's one week in May. Picture of my tracker. And this is a particularly tough Monday. A lot of kind of low scores, not many high scores.

So I fill this one out, and my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, my life is falling apart. But then I take a step back, and I noticed that my Sunday was fine, pretty good. My Saturday was good. And then I keep going, and sure enough, Chris, I just had one bad day. And the therapists are right. I have the emotional stability of a theater kid. You know, for months, Mondays would hit me super hard. Anybody hate Mondays?

Two people hate Mondays. Well, I hate Mondays. And so these are my scores on Monday. Several Mondays over a course of a few months. I get low scores across dimensions. I don't love my wife well. Pouted at her. She calls me pouty pants sometimes.

I didn't do well at work. I felt stressed. I handled my emotions poorly. I didn't eat well. But then, here's the thing. I noticed this pattern, which is the Mondays were typically bad, but this Monday storm always passes.

Usually by Tuesday or Wednesday. which shifts how I think about Mondays, right? Because there's a fundamental difference between a tough day when you project it out into eternity, as I often do, and a bad day when you already know the end of the story. You know, I also get tunnel vision, especially at work. My wife is a big logistics gal, and I'm not a big logistics guy. So she'll text me at work for logistics, and this one time she did this for 12 and a half hour straight. And I saw the text, I didn't like see, see the text, right?

There didn't answer, and so she knows me, and so she sent me this calendar invitation to my work, you know, and I responded in 30 seconds. So that's not just this bad habit. It's really my default to reduce myself to one dimension, especially work. Anyone else? But the tracker helps with that too. So here's a great week at work. Crushed it. But then spiritually, kind of off. And then I look at other dimensions and I started out the week strong, but then I kind of fell apart. See, the tracker visually reminds me that the good life is not just one dimension. In doing this every night, it forces my brain to optimize across dimensions to balance the tradeoffs and to adjust my focus when needed.

You know, I'll probably never forget. I was sitting in a cabin in Mountain of North Carolina. It was 9 p.m. one day, and I was filling out my tracker on vacation. And it struck me that night for some reason that my loving Ashley question had been flashing red at me for months. And the other dimensions were basically green. I was doing fine. And for some reason that night, it struck me, Chris, this is not the promise you made Ashley on your wedding day. This is, this is not what you said to her. Is this the way you want to look back on your life that you had a good career? But you neglected the one relationship that you claim is the most

important to you? That is not the good life. That is a wasted life. That is a failed life. life. And that hit me super hard, so I made some changes. And sure enough, within a few months, things started to shift. The scores were improving, but my wife noticed. And I often wonder, if I hadn't had the tracker, how long would it have taken me to get this wake-up call? Okay, so this point, some of you are into this, some of you are like, this is fine for you, but I'm not that, like, discipline, or I don't like that much system, I don't like Excel. So I get that, but here's the thing I love filling out my tracker. And I don't think it's because I'm a consultant.

I do like Excel, but it's because I feel myself becoming a more full human. But I am a consultant, so I did build you three versions of my tracker. The light, medium heavy, so you can download these and actually measure your lives tonight. You know, I still wake up sometimes at 3 a.m. but now I don't really panic anymore. I know I'm managing the full picture of my life because I'm measuring it. And I'd invite you, join me. Because the life you measure just might be the good life.

Thank you. That was Chris Musser at TED at BCG and Dubai in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Staley is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos,

Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.