How to Upgrade Your Life
The accidental formula that made me a better human
There are two ways to instantly upgrade your life.
Upgrade your environment.
Upgrade the people in your environment.
I believe in this so much that I rethought what an “upgrade” even is.
Here’s the counterintuitive part: I stopped adding and started subtracting.
Rethinking Upgrades
When we think of upgrades, we naturally think about adding something better.
Maybe:
A trip to the mountains to get quiet and plan
A new studio setup that feels more inspiring
New mastermind groups and connections to improve the “average of the five people”
I wanted to make things easier on myself.
Instead of adding, I started asking what I could subtract.
Elimination is often easier than addition.
Removing one thing that drags me down beats adding one more thing to manage.
Here’s what this looks like in my day.
Upgrading My Environment
I’m a slave to my environment.
In positive environments, I’m kinda superhuman. In negative ones, I’m totally useless.
The first part of my subtraction game is simple: remove distractions, reduce complexity, eliminate decision fatigue.
Examples:
Keeping junk food out of reach
Replacing my old office chair so I can sit long enough to finish what I start
Changing my daily driving route so I don’t zone out and get fresh stimuli for creativity
Small shifts like these don’t fix everything.
They just help me show up a little more like the person I’m trying to be.
This gets even more meaningful when I look at the people around me.
Upgrading the People in My Environment
I’ve become more careful about who I let into my “attention circle.”
Not because I’m trying to impress anyone but more because my bandwidth is finite.
To be clear:
I’m not chasing new billionaires to learn from
I’m not trying to do collabs with influencers
I’m definitely not picking up golf to network
Subtraction feels healthier for me right now. I completely understand that it may be different for you.
I didn’t know how to do this (subtraction) at first.
So I made a list.
Here’s what I did:
I wrote down the most amazing humans I’m connected to
Beside each name, I listed the qualities I admired
I added notes on how each person made me feel when I was with them
Then I asked AI to help me make sense of it.
Ai was surprisingly helpful.
4 Patterns That Drive My Best Relationships
The top qualities had nothing to do with wealth, status, or influence.
They also had nothing to do with how long I’d known someone.
The AI analysis made something click for me and I even turned it into an evaluation rubric.
Pretty nerdy, I know.
4 patterns drive my best relationships:
People with extreme work ethic
Relationships where I can contribute and feel useful
People who are kind
Relationships where I don’t feel any obligation
That last one hit hard.
Obligatory energy. Oof.
I realized I had a few people in my life where the connection was held together mostly by obligation.
The more I thought more about it I also realized that the feeling of obligation was entirely self-imposed. Meaning, I made it all up in my head. The silver lining was that it meant that I could disconnect from it just as easily.
Therefore, once I made the decision, I just backed off psychologically.
It instantly lifted something heavy off my chest that I didn’t know I was carrying.
I stepped away from four of those relationships recently.
It felt like upgrading my operating system without installing anything new.
Make Upgrades Easier
Sometimes it’s not about your “To Do” list.
It’s about your “Not To Do” list.
Subtraction is a powerful upgrade mechanism.
Use it often.
If you liked this post, you will like this one too!
May be short
Number 4 is huge.
Just reading it made me realize how many relationships I have that are purely out of obligation.
No bueno. Great read Sharran.