Buster Benson, founder of 43things.com

Show Notes:

Buster Benson

• 43 Things – good way to bring people onto the Internet before blogging was popular.
• 750 Words – getting people to write.
• Health Month – getting people to create and stick to health habits.
• Way of the Duck – habits and changing your life.
• Self-published novelist, project manager at Twitter
• Twitter has values and a community feel, works to affect the future instead of optimizing things from the past; resonates with Buster.
• How do you change yourself? Through reflection, and data is a way to do this reflection.
• Interested in change and how people change, since early 2000s.
• Tracks a lot of data or data on himself, but it’s not very possible to track the intangible meaning in quality time spent with people who are important to you.
• Looks at life in reverse from the perspective of his deathbed hypothetically: it’s important to follow your passions, not let people control you or tell you what’s right or wrong.
• Realized that it’s not what you do, but what mindset you do it in. Utilizes both high and low energy mindsets.
• Works on larger view of creating habits: how can you make these tiny habits less fragile? Habits are often surrounded by circumstances of randomness; welcoming and loving the change is a good mindset to create habits. Instead of fighting against the world, you accept the change.

Buster Benson is a product manager at Twitter and founder of 43things.com, a site for listing your goals, sharing progress, and encouraging others with similar goals (among other sites he’s founded). Buster does interesting experiments with habits and data tracking, and writes about what he’s learning about on his excellent blog, Way of the Duck.

In this interview, Buster shares insights into how he uses data to transform habits and the importance of not letting people control you or tell you what’s right or wrong.