The Experiment Driven Life
There’s a natural human tendency to clamp down on change out of fear, but some of our biggest failures occurred because we didn’t make a change.
— Garrett Reisman NASA Astronaut & Senior Advisor at SpaceZ
After seeing all the ways that goal-setting frameworks fail people in helping them achieve their goals, I developed a solution to trick your brain into accepting the inevitable: you will fail many times on your path to greatness. My proven approach is a way to trick your ego into thinking of failure as the key to unlocking information on how to achieve the life you truly dreamed of. The Experiment Driven Life is a way of living your life where you become willing to take risks, accept failure, learn, adapt and develop into an extraordinary version of yourself.
One of my hypotheses about life is that when things come naturally to you, it is difficult to accept persistent rejections and failures that are required to be extraordinary. A hypothesis is an assumption with limited evidence that serves as a starting point for further investigation. Nobody likes to be rejected or fail, but if you aren’t exposed to it at an early age in life, I can see how rejection and failure become scarier as you get older.
The Experiment Driven Life is a mindset that embraces learning, experimentation, and innovation in your personal life. By learning to live life as an experiment, we become willing to take risks, accept failure, learn, adapt and develop into something truly extraordinary. You are willing to do the work many are afraid to do because their ego is attached to what others think about them.
Someone living their life from an Experiment Driven mindset is attached to learning and evolving from the lessons they learn. It is an iterative process to living your life and it doesn’t end when you achieve success, it stops when you die.
I am personally driven by a hypothesis that once people reach middle age, they are so set in their ways that they stop evolving. They blame things, like aging, as a reason for why they can no longer or should no longer do the things they used to do. The jokes about how “everything hurts when you get older” are not funny to me anymore. If we are going to live to be 100, I want to disrupt everything we’ve been told about aging.
As a competitive figure skater who competes against women half my age, it would be very easy for me with all the injuries, broken bones, and chronic pain to say “I’m too old for this.” I reframed this question: what if I’m not too old for this? What will it take for me to prove that age is nothing but a number? I approached the problem like I do a new technology product.
What I know about building companies is that you take a vision, form a hypothesis (design the product), test the hypothesis (build the product), validate or invalidate the hypothesis (launch and learn) and then you either iterate (improve) or pivot (adapt). This is exactly how I approach my goals in skating. I use skating as an example because the feedback loops are measurable and shorter in nature (important for building successful products) and there are behaviors I can control.
To form a good experiment you need to be able to control for the controllable and thanks to all of my technology devices, I can control everything from my basal body temperature to my glucose levels. I’ve even placed boundaries on bedtime (8:30 PM to be precise) because it is a non-negotiable for me on training days. Control the controllable.
The Experiment Driven Life consists of 3 steps: Explore, Learn, and Optimize.
Step 1: Explore
A quote attributed to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt has inspired millions of people around the world asks “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” Eleanor Roosevelt was a risk taker, she came from privilege and could afford to fail. But regardless of your circumstances, you should never limit your goals to things you can do today. Your vision should be BIG.
Oprah is a master class on how this can be done. She talks about how it was her grandmother’s greatest hope that she finds a ‘good white family’ to work for but Oprah knew she was destined for bigger things.
When I was 19, I received a flyer in the mail and it had a quote in it that I cut out and saved all of these years. It is my favorite quote in the entire world and if you have not read James Allen “As A Man Thinketh” I highly recommend you do.
The vision you glorify in your mind, the ideal you enthrone in your heart, this you will build your life by, this you will become. — James Allen
The vision you have in your mind is your North Star in life. It is mission-critical that you spend time cultivating this vision and that it is big. Don’t be afraid.
Step 2: Learn
Once you create a vision and have your North Star, you can set up your experiment. Most traditional goal-setting frameworks start with the outcome in mind: lose 10 pounds, make more money, and buy a house. I think the reason why most people fail to reach their goals is that these outcomes are not grounded in a why. Why do you want to lose 10 pounds? Why do you want to make more money?
Your why will answer your hidden motivation and unlock the key to helping you understand what exactly you need to do in order to achieve your ideal outcome.
To give you an example, I want to lose 10 pounds. I have not weighed this amount since I was 22. My body resists the weight loss. The minute I hit 155 it will pop back up to 157–158. I have not been able to break through 155. I have a mental number of 148 that I want to achieve knowing that it will be physically difficult for me to achieve this number. I have over 110 pounds of muscle mass in my body. My body will do everything it can to preserve itself.
Why do I want to weigh 148? The two things I struggle with the most on the ice are my cardio capacity and rotational speed. My hypothesis is if I get leaner (lose 10 pounds of body fat) while improving my strength-to-weight ratio (measuring this with a deadlift currently at 145 pounds), I will be able to skate my program without hitting the upper limits of my heart rate (180–190 bpm which is extremely uncomfortable for me as my max heart rate (HR) is 192. Although lately I’ve gotten it as high as 200). As an “elderly” athlete, heart rate during exertion matters. I tell people it is the equivalent of being chased by a bear while managing the fear of falling and breaking yet another bone.
How to set the hypothesis?
I believe that [in losing 10 pounds], [I/we] will achieve [increased cardio capacity].
How to measure success or if the hypothesis has been validated?
I will know I am successful when [I can run a mile in less time while maintaining a heart rate of 150].
The experiment itself will be running a mile while keeping HR at 150 and seeing how long it takes me to run a mile. Then when I lose the 10 pounds, I will retest and measure a mile while keeping HR at 150 to see if I increase my speed while maintaining my HR.
Example: I run a mile in 10 minutes while maintain 150 bpm. My hypothesis is if I lose 10 pounds, I will run a mile in 9 minutes while maintaining 150 bpm.
Because an experiment requires I control a variable, I’ll use my HR as the controllable and the speed (how quickly I run the mile) as the metric for success. Therefore my metric of success is NOT the 10 pounds. My metric of success is running the mile in less time while maintaing a HR of 150. What I hope this proves is that by losing weight, my body is able to perform more efficiently with less effort. This is important to me as someone who is older and still competitive because it means I can increase my capacity and tolerance for cardio.
The other important thing to note is that experiments need to be time-boxed. This doesn’t mean that you reach your goals in a set amount of time. The point of timeboxing experiments is so that you can commit to the process, with as little error as possible, and be able to prove whether your approach is working or not. All you are doing with these ‘time-boxed goal sprints’ is validating your approach through lessons learned.
If it takes 21 days to create a habit, maybe running 3-week sprints on an experiment is a manageable one that is backed by some scientific knowledge.
Step 3: Optimize
You have your vision, your North Star, your hypothesis, you tested your hypothesis and measured against your metric for success and now…you apply what you learned.
Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why do we waste so much time doing all the wrong things in our pursuit of goals? People are afraid of change and people are also not very consistent to know whether or not they would be successful. They are quick to put faith in someone else’s process rather than their own. You are unique. Everything about you — your mind, body and spirit makes your approach different than everyone else’s. This is why I think people often fail. You need to optimize for your own unique situation.
Because I’m fully plugged into technology (Oura, Elite HRV, Levels, Myzone, Plantiga, Sleep.me to name a few) I can control for and track real-time metrics, knowing very quickly whether something is working or not. While weight may be the holy grail metric, if my body is not managing stress well, I know that my body will not feel safe to lose weight. For me to succeed at reaching my goal, my body has to feel safe and this means sleeping, eating nutrient-dense foods, limiting alcohol, sugar, and processed foods, and doing my journaling, meditation, breathing, and low-impact cardio — in addition to my training.
Conclusion
I hope this helps you rethink how to shape your goals as you prepare for 2023. I hope to write more and talk about this approach because I’m extremely passionate about it. It is the process I used to reinvent myself from a fat, middle-aged woman, into a nationally ranked athlete, competing against women half my age.
If you got this far, I do have one request if any of this information resonated with you — can you share your thoughts with me? You can easily find me on Instagram or Twitter.
Thank you — and go kick some a$$.
