“I have not failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

- Thomas Edison

I've been lucky to meet some really smart people in my life.

I’ve worked with patent holders, Mensa members, and astrophysicists.

One of my friends has a PhD in neuroscience and performed surgery on a locust while keeping it alive. Seriously! He used its vision detection system to train a computer vision algorithm. Crazy, right?!

I even met “The Wizard of Apple", Kim Silverman.

My point is, I’ve sat in a lot of rooms with people with really impressive résumés and there’s one thing that has surprised me more than anything else about them: it’s how quickly they admit when they don’t know something.

I used to think smart people were the ones with all the answers.

Man, was I wrong!

In my experience, smart people are quick to admit when they don’t know something.
They don’t try to act like they’re following along when they aren’t.
They’re not afraid to ask “dumb questions.”

The first time it really landed was at Netflix.

I remember sitting in a meeting where a senior leader floated an idea for testing the auto-play preview feature. Someone pushed back and made a different suggestion. A third person said, "We don’t know. Let’s test both versions for 30 days and see which wins."

A few weeks later we had our answer.

The data revealed something we wouldn’t have otherwise discovered without running the experiment.

That happened over and over.

Netflix actually runs thousands of controlled experiments every year, and they’re not alone. Duolingo runs hundreds of experiments at a time. Booking.com famously runs over a thousand of these in parallel.

Most people have know idea that Viagra was originally developed by Pfizer in the late 1980s to treat chest pain from heart disease.

Post-it Notes came from a 3M scientist who was trying to invent a super-strong adhesive. He accidentally made the opposite.

Penicillin was discovered by accident.

These companies aren't successful because their leaders have the best instincts. They're successful because their leaders don't rely on their instincts.
They’re successful because they have the courage to admit they don’t know the answer and they’re willing to figure it out through trial and error.
They iterate their way to success with experimentation.

The process of experimentation is incredibly useful in developing new drugs, testing marketing copy, and building new apps.

It can also be applied in our personal lives.

There's a great book on this called Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She's a neuroscientist who used to work at Google and now runs Ness Labs.

Her core argument is that we unnecessarily make rigid commitments to things prematurely, and don’t do enough experimentation in our personal lives.

She suggests something simpler. Pick something you're curious about. Set a tiny, time-bound experiment. Run it. See what you learn.

Most of us walk around with a folder full of "maybe one day." Maybe one day I'll try living somewhere new. Maybe one day I'll switch careers. Maybe one day I’ll venture outside my circle. The folder gets thicker every year. Nothing in it ever gets tested.

We tell ourselves it's because we're being careful.

It isn't. It's because experiments require admitting we don't know. And admitting we don't know feels like admitting we're not ready, or not enough.

That's not caution. That's ego protection wearing a cardigan.

Carl Jung said, "Intellectualism is a common cover-up for fear of direct experience."

He was right.

Analysis is the costume fear wears when it wants to look productive

The moral of the story is that experimentation can lead to incredible breakthroughs, and most of us aren’t taking enough experiments.

Why?

Because it takes courage to experiment, and fear stops us from trying new things.

Anaïs Nin wrote that “life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”

Please give yourself the permission to experiment. To try something new. To fail.

Run the experiment.

You're allowed to not know. It’s OK.

That's the whole point.

Here's your reflection for the week:

Think back to the last time you ran a real experiment in your own life.

If you can't remember one, that's an important piece of information.

Stop and reflect back on something you wish you had experimented with.

What would you like to have tested? In what ways do you think it could’ve served you?

Here's your challenge for the week:

Pick ONE area of your life right now that you're not fully satisfied with right now, and design one small experiment in that area.

Not a transformation. Just an experiment. Time-bound, cheap, reversible.

Some examples to prime the pump:

Write down what you're testing and what you're going to observe. Pick the lowest-cost version that still gives you real data.

Then run the experiment. Email me and let me know about your results. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Remember: “life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

With courage,

Jonathan