How I Define “Best Version” — And How You Should Define Yours
Series: Upgrade Your Life — Post 4 of 6
The tagline on this site has been the same for quite a while now. I think I changed it around the time of the COVID lockdowns.
Be the best version of yourself.
It’s right there in the header. It’s the mission statement I’ve built this whole corner of the internet around a constant reminder of what I should be doing everyday, week, month, quarter…. And for a long time, if you had asked me exactly what I meant by it, I would have given you a vague answer about growth and potential and becoming.
Which, when I think about it now, is a little embarrassing. You shouldn’t have a mission statement you can’t actually define.
So let me define it. And then I want to challenge you to define yours — because I think most people are chasing a version of themselves that was never really theirs to begin with.
The version we inherit
Here’s something worth sitting with: most people’s idea of their “best self” was handed to them by someone else.
By parents who had specific ideas about what success looked like. By a culture that measures achievement in salary, titles, marriage, kids, cars and square footage. By social media feeds full of people performing a carefully curated version of a life that may or may not actually exist.
We absorb these definitions early and quietly. And then we spend years chasing them — working harder, earning more, optimizing relentlessly — without ever stopping to ask whether any of it is actually what we want.
I did this for a long time. I had a mental image of what the “successful version” of me looked like. And a lot of that image was assembled from other people’s expectations, not my own honest reflection.
The first step toward your best version is realizing you might be working from someone else’s blueprint.
What I actually mean by “best version”
When I use that phrase now, I mean something pretty specific.
The best version of me is not the richest version of me, or the most productive version, or the most admired. Those things might be byproducts of living well, but they’re not the point.
The best version of me is the one who shows up fully in the areas that matter most to me — my relationships, my health, my work, and my inner life — without constantly sacrificing one for the others.
It’s the version who does what he says he’s going to do. Who doesn’t run from hard conversations. Who takes care of his body not because of how it looks but because of how it performs. Who creates things — like this blog, the systems I design or the websites I am constantly building — not because they’ll go viral but because making things is part of who I am.
It’s a version defined by values, not metrics.
That distinction matters a lot. Metrics are things someone else can count. Values are things only you can live.
The three questions I keep coming back to
When I’m trying to figure out whether I’m living in alignment with my own definition — rather than drifting toward someone else’s — I ask myself three questions.
Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think I should?
“Should” is almost always someone else talking. Your parents. Your peers. Society. Wanting is yours. The gap between should and want is where a lot of quiet unhappiness lives.
If nobody ever knew about this, would I still do it?
This one cuts through a surprising amount of noise. If the answer is no — if the only reason you’re pursuing something is for the recognition or the appearance — that’s worth examining. Not everything done for external reasons is wrong. But you should know when you’re doing something for the audience versus for yourself.
At the end of my life, will I be glad I spent my time this way?
The old “deathbed test.” It’s a cliché because it works. We’re very bad at thinking long-term, and this question forces you to zoom out past the immediate pressure of the moment and see the bigger picture.
I don’t ask these questions every day. But I come back to them whenever I notice I’m on autopilot — moving through the motions of a life without really choosing it.
Your definition will be different from mine
This is important enough that I want to say it plainly: your best version is not my best version.
My version involves writing. Yours might not. Mine involves a certain kind of independence and self-direction. Yours might thrive in a team. Mine is grounded in a particular set of values that have taken me decades to really understand. You have your own.
The goal of this series — and honestly the goal of this site — has never been to give you my life. It’s to give you tools and perspective that help you build yours more deliberately.
A lot of self-improvement content fails at this. It tells you what to want. A certain kind of productivity, a certain kind of morning routine, a certain kind of success. And you try to bolt that onto your life and it doesn’t fit and you wonder what’s wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. The template was wrong.
So what does your best version look like?
I’m actually asking. Not rhetorically.
Take ten minutes — right now, or tonight, or this weekend — and write down your answers to these three prompts:
- What kind of person do I actually want to be, in my own words, with nobody watching?
- What are the three or four areas of life that matter most to me — the ones where, if I’m thriving, everything else feels manageable?
- What would I have to stop doing, or stop pretending to care about, to live more honestly in alignment with that?
That third one is usually where the real work is. Because the best version of yourself isn’t just about adding things. It’s often about subtracting the things you’ve been doing for the wrong reasons.
Write it down. Actually do it. Not in your head — on paper. If you use a planner, this is what the quarterly goal-setting pages are for.
And if you want to share what you come up with — or push back on anything I’ve said here — the comments are open. This is the kind of conversation I actually want to have.
This is post 4 of 6 in the Upgrade Your Life series. Start at the beginning with The Gap Between Who You Are and Who You Want to Be. Next up: Lessons from Scott Adams on systems over goals.
David Daniels has been writing at DavidDaniels.com since 2001. Download the free life planning workbook, Write Open Act, to work through these questions with structure and intention.
