Tracking Your Dreams

Creating Streaks

Streaks have always been helpful to me, building a chain of habits that help you see your own progress. For entrepreneurs, they are especially important because it’s so easy to feel like you aren’t making progress. Many entrepreneurs tell me, 

“I get to the end of the day and it feels like the scoreboard is reset to zero.” 

Yikes.

Jerry Seinfeld was always a big proponent of this idea, saying that the best thing you can do as a comedian is “Write jokes, every day” and “don’t break the chain!” 

He uses a calendar and writes a big “X” on the day when he would write jokes.

Right now, I’m following “The Way” meditation app, and I’m about 80/100 or so Meditation sessions in. It’s nice when apps track your streak for you, however, I have also been using Excel spreadsheets a lot lately. 

Simple Tracking

I used to be a heavy user of different tech and tools like Notion or Evernote and kept up with my work with more intense systems. Today, I mostly use Excel, my Apple notes, and then one-off Google docs for simple reviews. ChatGPT, of course, is up regularly and is sort of a booster pack to whatever I’m already doing. 

It’s been fun to track what I’m reading, the comments I’m getting, and what my workouts are for the day. I feel good tracking because I’m able to better recollect progress. 

I think that when you have ADHD, you do more than most people and feel like you’ve done less. 

Mostly, what’s probably missing is a sense of completeness of tasks. I notice that even on weekends that there are days when I make a to-do list, I simply feel better and feel more productive. 

Tracking my Writing

What metrics do you track?

What we choose to track really matters. You probably don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about this. If we track outcomes and external validation, we’re going to be stuck in a terribly difficult loop that we can never get out of. 

Tracking our effort as an input helps separate who we are from what we do, or maybe it combines it, in a way that makes us feel better when we’re taking action. 

This simple point; knowing what to track, and then tracking it, while avoiding the trap of tracking things that simply don’t matter – is surprisingly difficult. Social media tracks things on your behalf, they are a default metric that you are forced to care about. 

On social media, I believe “comments” are the best thing to track. Or you could say you track positive interactions with your community. I think that’s a fairly decent metric as it involves connection. Most other metrics are totally pointless. Even then, I can’t really *create* comments and not all comments are the same. 

Knowing what to track, and why it matters to you will take your life in completely different directions. Mr. Beast has optimized his entire life around a game that I think is somewhat silly: Youtube’s algorithm. He’s the best person in the world at optimizing for Youtube’s algorithm. Because of that, his choice of what to create is limited by that filter. I don’t look up to someone like Mr. Beast because it’s not something I care about at all. 

And that’s OK. I’m mostly talking about knowing that for yourself rather than feeling the allure of someone else’s game that actually means nothing to you. 

If you told me I could have 1Million views on a video tomorrow, but it had to be in the style of Mr. Beast, I wouldn’t do it. 

That’s obvious because I’m not doing it.

The Good Life

Tracking what matters to me let’s me stack my good days, good sessions, and good moments together. 

If you can design your life in such a way that you have many good or even great things hap