Future Press Release

Following the Amazon principle of working backwards from the customer and writing your press release before you start, I’ve written this post introducing the app, which is what I would put out at launch.

Today I’m launching BestSelfApp - a new app that uses data science to help you be the best version of yourself. What do you want most out of life? To be healthy and feel good in your body? To be a better partner or father? To know that you’re making the most of your potential professionally? You probably want a lot of things but whatever else you want to do, accomplish, or have in life will depend on your ability to live each day up to your own potential. This app aims to help you to be your best self more often so you have the best shot of getting what you want out of life. It shouldn’t take you more than a minute a day to use, and the resulting analysis should speak for itself and cause you to want to make changes because you’ll see how your everyday actions are affecting your ability to live your life the way you actually want to.

It starts by asking you to define your goals, more specifically how you want to be and live each day. These are intensely personal, and should be your own, however these statements generally begin with “I” and end with “today”, and are easily answered with a yes/no question, e.g. “I felt healthy and physically good in my body today.” If you’ve lived the day as the best version of yourself you generally should be able to say “yes” to these questions at the end of each day. Then you’ll list out the stuff you do that might affect your living how you want to live. Things like going for a morning run, if you ate badly, ate certain categories like dairy, drank caffeine or alcohol, what vitamins, supplements or meds you take.

Once a day the app will prompt you to provide the data on if you felt you met each goal and what you did for the day. It will also automatically grab any health and activity data already stored in your phone. After a few days it can start showing you reports on how the things you’re doing are impacting your daily goals.

The unique aspect of this app is that it shows you how interrelated all of these things are, your activities, what other activities they will lead to, and how these things affect how you feel in your own judgment about living your life the way you want to. The real value isn't to optimize your life, making little tweaks here and there, it's to zero in on the big things that are really holding you back. You may find for example that if you reach your goal of drinking enough water each day it has only a slight impact on your feeling healthy or reaching your goals, while something else might have a gigantic impact - maybe it's alcohol, maybe it's your eating or your sleeping, or maybe it's a person in your life.

You probably think you already know what’s good for you and what’s bad for you, but you may be way off on the extent of how much some of these things are affecting your ability to get what you want out of life. What do you want more? This app aims to give you a more accurate mental model of what it would feel like to make that choice knowing what it will lead to, and how it would feel not to make that choice and what that would lead to. It helps you realize you’re not just making one choice, you’re making a series of choices that will affect you for days. The idea is once you see the extent and duration of the impact certain things are having on you, you’ll make changes because you’ll simply want to live to your potential more than you want the short term things that are holding you back.

Whatever else you want to do or accomplish in life will depend on your ability to live up to your own potential. This app helps you to be your best self more often so you have the best shot of getting what you want out of life. All it takes is 1 minute each day to check off how you felt and what you did.

Learn more at www.bestselfapp.xyz.