The Upgrade Program
The Upgrade Program (UP) is an experimental program that uses emerging technology, behavioral science, and applied rationality to help you set, plan, and achieve your most valuable life goals. It helps you see and shape your future.
You can do your UP on your own for free or use our curated coaches, assistants, and specialists to help you systematically “upgrade” every area of your life as cost-effectively as possible, in rank order of your values. We call this life optimization as a service.
For some, UP is like a head-to-toe, inside-and-out life makeover. It helps you “know thyself” and live more in alignment with your values. For others, UP is a goal achievement system. You tell us what you want to accomplish and we do it with or for you. For others, it’s whatever we co-create together.
Each UP is custom-designed around you, but in the deepest versions they consist of 1,000+ steps and run 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 10 years or 100 years. Team-based and group-based UPs are also available.
As long as we share values and strategies around improving the world, we’d be honored to support you or your organization. We work with anyone dedicating their lives to doing the most good for others, with a special focus on helping AI safety advocates.
What’s UP?
Epistemic Housekeeping
You don’t know what you don’t know. And much of what you “know” is actually wrong. Start by rethinking your life from first principles.
Model Your Priorities
Out of trillions of possible actions, what should you do right now? To answer that, build a quantitative model of your values.
Set Life Goals
Working from your values, determine your life goals and decide how much of your time, money, and other resources you’ll allocate to each.
Assess Yourself
What is your baseline success rate on your goals so far? Are you progressing, maintaining or regressing? Take hard data to find out.
Build a Personal Team
Self-development is an insufficient framing if you want great success in life. Also focus on your personal team’s development.
Plan Each Goal
Actually achieving your life goals is hard. To make it easier, create simple, realistic, science-based plans for each goal tailored to you.
Execute Plan with Team
Work with your team to do the thousands of discrete tasks necessary to realize your goals. The real “magic” is (strategic) hard work.
Analyze Results
Even with your team’s best efforts, many of your plans will fail. Dispassionately analyze the data and learn how to do better next time.
Iterate on Plans
Repeat the plan-experiment-learn process until you get it right. Trial and error is inevitable; the goal is to move quickly and cost-effectively.
Level Up
Once you’re reliably progressing on all of your life goals, you’ve reached what we call UP v2.0. Then things start to get really interesting…
Why do UP?
What if you had step-by-step. science-based plans outlining how to achieve your most valuable goals? What if you had a dedicated team of aligned experts and assistants helping you and potentially only getting paid if and only if you were successful?
Would you be more likely to achieve what’s most important to you?
Our research indicates yes.
What happens in an UP?
Built a startup that reached a valuation of $1B+ in 1 year
617 UP Team tasks over 391 hours
Improved overall Life Score from 6.7 to 8.9 over 3 years
410 UP Team tasks over 377 hours
Closed $250M+ deal and achieved financial independence
108 UP Team tasks over 86 hours
Saved large fraction of net worth by moving to a favorable tax climate
171 UP Team tasks over 86 hours
Ran a multimillion fund doing world-changing work
274 UP Team tasks over 213 hours
Set up cognitive and productivity enhancement systems
58 UP Team tasks over 34 hours
Made some or significant progress on 29 out of 41 life areas
38 UP Team Tasks over 23 hours
Maintained deep focus on highest value work throughout the year
712 UP Team tasks over 1,058 hours
Outsourced 200+ hours of work to first personal assistant
182 UP Team tasks over 126 hours
Helped run a high-profile conference with key social innovators
44 UP Team tasks over 19 hours
Instead of pursuing your dreams, instead consider executing your well-designed “adaptive life plan”
If you’re curious how we might help you to do this, schedule a short call with us. It’s free and focused on clarifying and immediately advancing whatever you most value in life.
