Chapter 10 · Part 2: The Data Behind the Daily Questions — And What My Own Scores Reveal#

In the last section, I walked you through why the six active questions are built the way they are. Now let me show you whether they actually work.

Because a beautifully designed tool that doesn’t produce results is just a pretty decoration. And I didn’t build this system to hang on anyone’s wall. I built it to change behavior.

The Data#

Over the past several years, my research team ran a series of studies involving more than 2,500 participants across 79 separate trials. The participants came from different industries, different countries, different age groups, and different rungs of the organizational ladder — from entry-level employees to C-suite executives.

The protocol was dead simple: every day, participants answered the six active questions, scoring themselves 1 to 10 on each. Not “Did I achieve my goal?” but “Did I do my best?” The lens was always effort, never outcome.

Here’s what we found:

Finding 1: People who asked themselves the active questions daily showed significant improvement in all six dimensions within two weeks. Not some dramatic overnight makeover — but measurable, consistent, upward movement. The kind of progress that compounds.

Finding 2: The biggest gains showed up in the areas people initially scored lowest. The questions didn’t just pat existing strengths on the back. They zeroed in on weaknesses — exactly where growth was needed most.

Finding 3: The “active” framing made a huge difference. When we tested the same questions in passive form (“Do you have clear goals?” instead of “Did you do your best to set clear goals?”), improvement shrank dramatically. The active framing — the “did I do my best” structure — wasn’t a stylistic flourish. It was the active ingredient.

Finding 4: The effect held up over time. Participants who kept the practice going for six months showed sustained improvement. Those who stopped drifted back toward their starting point within weeks. The system works as long as you run it. The moment you stop, the environment starts winning again.

The Surprising Implication#

Here’s what hit me hardest about the data: the questions didn’t teach anyone a single new thing.

Nobody picked up a new skill. Nobody gained new knowledge. Nobody received fresh information about their goals, their relationships, or how engaged they were. They already knew all of it.

What the questions did was make that knowledge visible every single day. They pulled background awareness into the foreground. They took the things people already cared about and forced a daily showdown: “Did you actually try today?”

That daily showdown — uncomfortable, repetitive, inescapable — is what drove the change. Not a flash of insight. Not a burst of motivation. Not some breakthrough epiphany. Just the steady, grinding pressure of facing the same six questions every day and answering honestly.

My Own Practice#

Let me get personal for a moment, because I think it matters that the person recommending this system lives inside it, too.

Every night, someone calls me. Not a therapist. Not a coach. A friend named Kate. She runs through the six questions — plus a few extras I’ve added for myself — and I give her my scores. The whole thing takes about three minutes.

Here’s a snapshot of a typical week:

A few patterns jump out:

• My weekend scores for goals and progress dip. That’s because I loosen the structure on weekends — which is fine, as long as I see it and it’s a deliberate choice, not a slow slide.
• Happiness and relationship scores tend to climb on weekends. More time with people I love, less time in high-pressure professional mode.
• My engagement score barely moves. That’s my chronic struggle — staying fully present instead of letting my mind race ahead to the next thing.

The point isn’t that my scores are impressive. Some days they’re mediocre. Some days they’re flat-out embarrassing. The point is that I see them. Every night. In numbers. And that visibility — that unavoidable, quantified face-in-the-mirror moment — is what keeps the engine running.

The Objections#

Let me tackle the three pushbacks people raise most often:

Objection 1: “Scoring myself feels artificial.” It is artificial. That’s the feature. Your natural, free-form, unstructured self-reflection is what brought you here. If it were doing the job, you wouldn’t need this book. The artificiality forces a level of specificity and honesty that casual reflection never delivers.

Objection 2: “I’ll just fudge the scores.” Maybe at first. But here’s what actually happens: people who score themselves daily develop an internal honesty reflex surprisingly fast. When you know the same question is coming tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, the cost of lying rises. Because the lie doesn’t vanish — it sits in your data, contradicting reality, making the whole exercise feel hollow. Most people would rather face an uncomfortable truth than maintain a comfortable fiction day after day.

Objection 3: “What’s the point if I can’t control results?” That’s precisely why we measure effort, not results. You can’t control whether your boss values your work, whether the market rewards your strategy, or whether your partner reciprocates your kindness. But you can control whether you tried. And measuring what you can control is the only measurement that generates insight you can actually act on.

The Transition to Practice#

The six questions are the engine. But an engine sitting on a workshop floor is just a noisy machine. It needs a chassis — a daily practice with clear rules, rhythms, and upkeep.

That’s what we build next: the daily system that takes these six questions from an interesting concept to a behavioral operating system that runs every single day, rain or shine, fired up or flat.

Because the whole point of a system is that it works when you don’t feel like working.