If you want to operate at an optimal level, daily updates are essential. We tend to go about our days with little intention on how we spend our time and what we want to accomplish. To achieve our optimal self we need to be intentional about how we spend our time.

Purpose: To accelerate personal growth.

How it works: Every morning, send a daily update to someone you trust that can hold you accountable. Also get their daily updates to give you motivation and inspiration to be better. It’s easy to get lazy and distracted, but having a reliable friend will keep you motivated. Hold each other accountable and have penalties if you miss a day.

Major 🔑: Send your daily update either when you wake up or before you sleep. It will help you have clarity and be more intentional about your day.

Ps. Watch this: https://youtu.be/N6eXhabIiOU

The daily update has 7 sections:

1. Weekly Goals: Break this section into sub-areas, for example: Focus, School, Relationships, or other areas you have in your life. List all the things you want to accomplish during the week in those categories. Add the deadline of when you want to get the goal done by. As you finish them, cross them out in your daily updates.

Example:

Focus

• Tuesday: Write a rough draft for replicate article.
• Thursday: Get feedback from 5 people.
• Saturday: Post the revised article on Medium and LinkedIn.

Relationships

• Before Wednesday: Have a total of 4 braindates. 2 must be from other cities.
• Thursday: Make parents breakfast in the morning and talk about how their doing.

School

• Monday: Submit essay on why pineapple shouldn't be on pizza.
• Tuesday: Study a total of 3 hours for chemistry test. 

Other

• Thursday: Write a handwritten thank you note to all my teachers expressing gratitude.

2. Goals for today: List everything you want to accomplish today. Be very specific and exhaustive. It shouldn’t only be TKS stuff, it should be everything. That way, you can better understand what you’re spending time on, if it aligns to your priorities, and make sure you actually complete the goals you set for yourself. Learn how to set achievable goals and manage your time. Unplanned things will come up during the day, but make sure you complete what matters and don’t get distracted. Important: be as specific as possible with your goals. Examples:

• Complete 2 modules of Andrew Ng AI course.
• Read Neuralink Paper on BMIs
• Study without my phone for 60min for math test tomorrow.
• Reach out to 10 AI experts on LinkedIn and ask to meet.

3. Results: Did you accomplish anything yesterday? Include things that you got done. Don't confuse these with tasks. Results are the end outcomes of smaller tasks. Examples include:

• Completed and posted replicate article on Linkedin, Medium, and TKS.life.
• Finished my replicate.
• Got invited to speak at TED in February.
• Complete my personal website
• Confirmed meeting with AI developer at Google.

These are all results of work you put in. You should aim to get a result each week, which can be part of your weekly goals. (Don't put things like: worked on my article or emailed a professor - these are not results.)

4. What I didn’t get done: This section should have goals from the day before that you didn’t complete. Be honest about this. You want to be held accountable and also be able to think about why you weren’t able to complete a goal you set for yourself the day before. Don’t add excuses, just list what you didn’t get done.

5. Daily Habits: In this section, outline areas you want to make sure you do everyday. For example:

#5amclub | Y

Meditation | Y

Workout | N

Daily Update | Y

Podcast | Y

The Hustle | N

6. Reflections: Write things that are on your mind. It can be thoughts you're having, something that happened, anything. It's a good place to introspect and think.

7. How I’m Feeling: I've started using emojis for this section, it's more descriptive 🤓😞🤢. If you’re not feeling great, it’s important to take a step back and focus on feeling good. Attitude is altitude. If you don’t feel good, everything will be harder. Life is about being happy, so make sure that’s your top priority if you’re ever feeling down. Communicating this to others will also help them empathize with you if you’re not achieving your goals. They’ll likely try to help you, which is so important if you’re feeling down. That’s what friends are for!

8.Mindset: In this section, write about how you're being intentional about practicing the mindset of the week. If I don't give you one, then you can train a mindset for yourself (examples: gratitude, honesty, boss mentality, bias towards action, kindness...). Tip: Make actionable goals for yourself to practice these mindsets everyday.

Optional sections:

Below are sections some people find very valuable. Feel free to customize your daily update based on what you want to be intentional about.

Gratitude: Include 1 thing you’re grateful for. It’s so easy for us to forget how lucky we are. Our minds always gravitates towards the negative. Consciously focus your mind towards remembering how awesome your life is and what you’re grateful for. This is key to happiness.

Relationships: Building and maintaining authentic relationships are key to happiness and a meaningful life. Tracking this metric is important because it will force you to get out of your hole if you find yourself heads down in research. Talking to people and going out of your way to make new relationships is very important. Go watch a movie, play laser tag, or go bowling. Doesn’t matter, but have new experiences with people - that’s how you’ll build relationships, through experiences.

How I can Improve: List something you can do better for the next day. We all have areas we can improve on, but it takes action to actually make the improvement. Write the action here.

Risks: If you aren’t a risk taker, it’s likely because your perceived risk is greater than actual risk. Train yourself to take risks so you can see that it’s all in your mind. If you don’t take risks, it will be tough to achieve big things. The result of not taking risks is just doing what everyone else is doing. Don’t be like everyone else.

Act of Kindness: Do something nice for someone each day. It can be small or big, doesn’t matter. You will get happiness by being kind and helping others. If you develop the habit of being kind to others, your life will be better. The opposite of this is being selfish, and that leads to jealousy, bad relationships, and loneliness.

Example of a good daily update:

Weekly Goals

AI Focus

• TKS + Velocity

#1 Priority: GO HARD ON THE CHALLENGE!!

• School

• Relationships

Review of Yesterday

• Did not complete CES Deadline for Nov 16
• Studied math for 2 hours
• Learned MERN Stack for 1 hour
• Completed all Velocity Requirements

Daily Goals

Daily Habits

How I'm Feeling

5/7 😎

I slept well, ate well, and picked up daily updates again. Doing pretty well.

Reflection

Consistency is key. If I work out or do daily updates sporadically, it's not much help. That's not improving everyday. If I turn these actions into high performance habits, I will improve 1% everyday, which leads to exponential growth in the long run. Just like the diagram Navid put in this week's Velocity requirements—1% better everyday for 1 year is 37.78x improvement! That's insane! My action item is to keep the goals for everyday meaningful but manageable so I can make legitimate progress.

Grateful for

The High Performance Habits podcast with Brendon Burchard. I used to watch Brendon Burchard back in 8th and 9th grade, and it was a very productive time in my life. Over time, I stopped listening to his content and stopped implementing his frameworks and mindsets in my life. Having listened to him speak again, I'm reminded of what it means to be high performing and to take ownership in your life.

Mindset - Celebrate Others

I'm going to shoutout my favorite teachers in each one of my classes today. They deserve it! Nobody recognizes their hard work. Yea, school can be boring sometimes, but it's not their fault. Everyday this week I want to celebrate someone different. I want to internalize this.