For Best Results, Treat Your Life Like One Big Experiment
By: Charlie Brown
Tags: Self Improvement, Personal Development, Life Hacking, Self, Life Lessons

I hated science as a kid. Experiments and me don’t always get along. In high school, I once had to take a chemistry lesson with the most immense amount of period pain. The teacher said to take care of the fumes escaping the flask but because of the pain, I didn’t hear her. So I stuck my head in. Next thing I knew I was waking up on the floor.

At the time, it was a lesson in three things:

Always listen to your chemistry teacher. Don’t go to school when you can barely stand up. Experiments can go wrong, so be extremely cautious.

That last point, however, is a problem.

Because we should always treat our life like one big, messy experiment.

Most of us don’t want to experiment with our own lives. We’ve learned that failure and making mistakes is too much of a risk to take, with too many perceived consequences. So we toe the line, try to learn from other people’s mistakes, and keep ourselves wrapped up in a proverbial security blanket that shields us from looking like a fool.

I’m tired of being comfortable. It’s boring.

Right now, I have no permanent home, no permanent job. Maybe I’ll make it as a Medium writer. Or a winemaker. Or a web designer. Or maybe even all three.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll spectacularly fail at all of them and will have to return to the UK, tail between my legs.

But I want to find out. I’m curious to see if I can do it.

We can watch what other people do with their lives and decide it’s not for us, but there is no substitution for doing it yourself. You are not them, so why would you assume that what works — or doesn’t work — for them would be the same for you?

So I’m taking the high-school science approach and applying it to my life. And I think you should too.

The Charlotte-Brown-Improve-Your-Life Method (Patent Pending)

You need a hypothesis, method, analysis, and conclusion.

Hypothesis: Buying a house will improve my life

Method: Buy a house

Analysis: Buying a house caused this author a great deal of happiness in the short term but became burdensome. The author developed an acute sense of claustrophobia and a sinking sensation that it no longer suited her lifestyle.

Conclusion: Sell the house. Invest the money. Travel instead.

Hypothesis: Writing on Medium is a great place to blog

Method: Write on Medium

Analysis: Writing on Medium caused this author a great deal of contentment and satisfaction

Conclusion: Continue to write on Medium and monitor feelings. If contentment decreases, re-evaluate.

Hypothesis: Getting a steady 9–5 job is a good thing

Method: Get a steady job

Analysis: Getting a steady job caused this author a great deal of stress and anxiety.

Conclusion: Quit steady job for entrepreneurship. Levels of contentment rose.

Did you notice that the method in each of the above examples is the simplest part of the experiment? Most people spend too much effort here and not on the analysis.

So you think you might like to try entrepreneurship? Then try it. Want to write on Medium? Do it. Don’t wait and don’t think too much about it otherwise you might find yourself down the ‘what if’ rabbit hole. What if it doesn’t work, what if I fail, what if people think badly of me?

We should be spending the majority of our time on the analysis. Without it, you could dig your heels into a bad situation, terrified about looking foolish, scared of that disapproving character that seems to live in all of our heads repeating ‘I told you that you couldn’t do it’ over and over until your poor brain believes it.

Instead, think about how this life decision has made you feel. What side effects were there, good or bad? Monitor your feelings, how do they change over time? Is it working the way you hoped or not? Tweak the method, notice the results. Still not working? Perhaps it’s your hypothesis. Back to the drawing board, you go.

Mini Experiments Can Foster Big Consequences

Maybe you don’t want to shape your life into something completely unrecognizable. Maybe you just want to make some small changes. It could be a shift in mindset, taking up meditation, or a new exercise regime.

The same method applies and can have unexpectedly large consequences. Mini experiments can lead to bigger things — you might find out something about yourself that you want to explore further.

Back in 2014, I thought I’d dabble in minimalism, throwing away possession or two. Now, I only own 95 things and my life is all the better for it.

Mini experiments can be a great way to find out how far you’re willing to go when it comes to your life choices. You might find out that you love an easy life bound by societal norms. Or you might find that you want to live on an Antarctic naval base serving food to scientists for half the year.

Wherever you land on the scale doesn’t actually matter. The important thing is that you’re thinking about it, doing it, and evaluating the results.

An Unexpected Side Effect

Treating your life choices like experiments can remove some of the emotion involved in decision making, which can cloud our judgment.

It’s all about re-framing. Instead of ‘if this doesn’t work, my life is screwed,’ it becomes ‘if this doesn’t work, let’s try something else.’

In my younger years, I was scared of everything. Scared of being in a room full of people I didn’t know, of interviewing for jobs, of being alone with my thoughts, of being alone full stop. Everything had so much emotion attached to it, most of which boiled down to ‘what if I embarrass myself, what will everyone think about me?’

I’m still scared about most of these things, but less so, because I’ve taken control and pulled some (although granted, not all) of the emotion out of my decisions.

That’s what life experiments allow you to do — you can own the decisions you make. It’s just an experiment. If it doesn’t work, you re-evaluate, you change the direction. Your experiment, your rules.