or Do You Think You Already Know Everything You Need to Know?
Your answer is a good indication of which Meta Mindset you’re operating from: Experiment or Production.
Experiment Mindset generates…experiments. Running an experiment involves identifying a course of action, following it for a specified period of time, and carefully observing what happens. This often builds creative tension since you don’t know what the outcome will be.
Production Mindset generates fixes. Fixing involves applying a predetermined solution to an identified problem, generally in order to relieve existing psychological tension.
When you’re operating from Experiment Mindset, you acknowledge that the sum of what you don’t know is greater than the sum of what you know—and you could be wrong about what you think you know. Your aim is to discover or learn something (aka explore). You pay attention to what happens once you set an experiment in motion with as open a mind as possible. You want to find out what’s so, whatever that may be.
When you’re operating from Production Mindset, you assume you know the information that is relevant to creating a solution to a problem. You tend to choose the process you’re most comfortable with or with which you have the most experience (aka exploit). You pay less attention to the results than to your performance. You want to alleviate whatever you consider to be the problem, but you also want to be right.
Unless your problem has a single, clear solution, experimentation is more valuable than applying a fix because you almost always learn something new.
Running Self-Experiments
It’s not too difficult to find advice about running experiments on your life, most of which focus on tracking data. The fact that almost all of this advice includes suggestions about what to experiment on indicates they are missing two key components.
- What aspect of your life do you want to change—and why?
- What is your desired outcome?
Taking someone else’s suggestion about what experiments to run is just like taking their advice about what habits you should develop. If your life is so generic that this advice works for you, my condolences. It shouldn’t work. You are the only person who can determine which habits to keep, change, or start. And you are the only person who can determine which aspects of your life to experiment with and how you will evaluate the results.
If you don’t know what you want, I’m not sure conducting random experiments will be useful. But it might at least be better than doing nothing. And maybe you’ll discover what you don’t want.
8 Steps for Running Experiments
- Identify your desired outcome.
- Determine a minimum of three different objectives that could possibly get you your desired outcome.
- Consider how you would conduct an experiment to test each one.
- Select one.
- Set up the parameters:
> What will you test?
> What data will you track and how will you record or track it?
> How and how often will you evaluate feedback?
> What is the timeframe (beginning and ending dates)?
> How will you measure success or failure? - Run the experiment.
- If you have comparative data available, check it against the results of your experiment.
- Decide on your next course of action:
> Continue the experiment.
> Implement the new behavior.
> Run a different experiment.
My Strength Training Experiment(s)
When I started running experiments on taking up strength training again after 10 months off, I was interested in testing whether I could do it, whether I would do it, and the efficacy of the reward I wanted to use.
I set up the initial experiment to complete three sessions a week for three weeks. I tracked basic data (sets, reps, and weights), which provided objective feedback. My level of energy and sense of wellbeing provided subjective feedback. I had lots of comparative data which provided a context for my current results. After the three weeks, I deemed the experiment a success on all counts and decided to continue setting up similar experiments. I’m at the beginning of the tenth week (fourth experiment), have added two more exercises to each workout, and so far have completed every workout I scheduled.
Among other things, I’ve learned that:
- I’m stronger than I thought I was.
- I can dance again!
- I prefer songs with 135-165 bpm (beats per minute) for any kind of exercise.
- I will work out no matter how much sleep I have (or haven’t) gotten and no matter how good or bad I feel.
- I learned about #4 because my rewards are so compelling I haven’t been willing to forgo them in order to slack off.
- I can jog on the treadmill again.
- I always feel better during and after walking, dancing, jogging, or doing strength training than I did before.
- Setting intentions for three-week periods works much better than operating under the misguided assumption I will continue doing this indefinitely just because it feels good now.
Since I still consider this program to be an experiment, I’m looking forward to what else I might learn along the way.