How Experiments Will Change Your Life

Welcome back everybody. I'm Brett Kistler.

And I'm Joe Hudson.

And this is The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living a life you want with enjoyment and ease.

Welcome everybody.

So today we're gonna talk about a modality for self-discovery that you can use to change your life.

Yeah, it's experiments. It's how to set up little tests and explorations in your life that will let you understand yourself far better and know how you can be more authentic and more successful in your life. And they are, they're really fun and they also super effective. One of my favorite things and, and a huge part of my entire growth process has been running experiments.

Yeah. Anyone who's been listening to the podcast for a while or who's done any of our work has seen how experiments are worked into our courses and are worked into into all the ways that we, that we explore ourselves in, in the Art of Accomplishment. And so I'd like to start by just talking about how did you come to the, uh, the way, the philosophy of experimentation that, that we, that we use in this work?

Yeah. So for me, it was just that I had really bad authority issues. That's, that's really the deal. So if you go back into my timeline, if you go back when I was like in my 20s and I was just getting into this kind of work and transformation, man, I just, there was no way I was going to listen to anybody. My dad was an authority that was not something to trust. And so I didn't trust authority at all. I projected my dad onto every authority figure. And so I would be looking at a book from, say, Adyashanti, and I would switch the book over to the backside. I would see his picture and I would say to myself, like, man, that guy needs his photo on it. He's like all in it for the ego. He can't be any good. Or I would hear somebody say something to the effect of power is the ultimate expression of fear. And then I would pick a book from Eckhart Tolle that somebody recommended and said The Power of Now. And I'm like, ha, the ultimate expression of fear. There was no way any teacher could do right by me. So I would read some of them and I go, ah, my brain was in a debate with everything that they said. And eventually I heard enough teachers say, don't trust me, uh, try it out for yourself, test it. And in fact, Adyashanti, the guy who, who who was a huge influence on me that I got over the picture clearly, uh, would, was one of those people who would say that. And so I did, and I took their advice. I, I said, okay, that's, that's something I can do. You want to put the power in my hands, that's where I can trust it. And so I started testing everything that I read. And it's funny now because I'm on Twitter and I'll say something on Twitter and I'll see somebody intellectually debate it. And so often what I want to do is just say, hey, like, don't debate it. Just try it out. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, don't. Like, just let it go. But you'll see this kind of intellectual thought process. And in the intellectual thought process, maybe semantics are disagreed on, or maybe there's an idea of something, but you haven't actually embodied it. It's not somatic. You don't understand it. You don't grok it. Grocking, meaning understanding on a physical level. And so, so that was the thing for me. And that's how, where it began. Experiments went through its own evolution and we can talk about that later, but it began with, I can't fucking trust anybody. I'm going to try it out for myself. I'm going to test it myself. I'm going to reinvent the wheel, but at least it's going to be my wheel. At least I know it's true. I know that the cadence of that wheel is going to be true. And that was, that's why it happened for me, just having authority issues. And it was by far one of the biggest blessings or fortunes of having authority issues was that I had to test everything.

Yeah. So one thing I'm hearing is, yeah, you can, you can take something like, all you need is love. We'll go with John Lennon. And you can be like, okay, I'll either take it or leave it, or I'll check internally. Does this feel true to me? If not, I'll throw it out. If it does, I'll take it on. But then there's something deeper in the crafting and creation of an experiment that is structured, that kind of creates some form of controlled environment where you can try something out over a period of time and then reflect on it. And so how did you get from the point of, "I don't really believe any of these teachers, but I still want the learnings, I want the juice," So I'm gonna find a way to make it mine. And how did that become the, this process of deeply structured experiments?

Yeah. So the original stuff wasn't so deeply structured. So the, the original experiments that I would run would be something like, I remember hearing from somebody, I can't even remember who anymore, but it was, I think it was this guy Papaji, and I was at this hotel and there was just a book lying around and I read it and it was just this arbitrary thing. And he said, trace your thought back to its origin. I did it. I just was inspired to do exactly that. And I somatically traced the thought back to where it came from. I was like, what the fuck was that? And it hit me. I was, I guess that's where you would use the word like. And so I was like, What the fuck was that? And so it was little moments that were very much just a suggestion and I did it. And then I thought to myself, what I need to do is really play out this experiment stuff. How do I do it? Not just in this moment, but over a period of time. And so the next experiment that I ran, particularly with that one, when I had that discovery was, what if I start tracing as many thoughts as I can for an hour back to their source? What happens then? And so it was this curiosity and wonder that was moving. And I would say more curiosity at the beginning because there was a desire for an answer, less wonder, but there was a little wonder in it. And I would just find these things that I was deeply curious about and run experiments to see what would happen.

And so over the course of the years and working with a lot of people, what role have you seen— role or roles— have you seen experiments play in the process of self-discovery?

Yeah. So some of the most important things that experiments do is one, they make it yours, meaning I can say something, I can believe something, but unless I've tested it, unless I know, unless I have that felt sense of it, then I don't really know it. I think about it like a poisonous mushroom. If I eat, let's say not a deadly, but a poisonous mushroom, someone says, that's poisonous. That's poisonous. Maybe I'll look at it and notice that if I've eaten it once, I'm going to know that crap's poison. I'm not going to touch it again. I'm not going to like go through the evening or 24 hours of puking. It's, there's a felt sense of it. And so it's not book learning. It's not something you can debate. And because of that, it really dictates your actions. You can have a thought process such as I don't have free will, or you can have a thought process of I do have free will, and that can be a debate forever. And you can also run an experiment designed to find out how is it that you make decisions. You can run an experiment to say, what happens if I do only the things that I'm called to do? Or what happens if I make a choice for every little thing that I'm doing today? And you can start experimenting, finding out what's the, what's the felt sense of, do I have free will or do I not have free will? So those are some of the things that help. One is that it makes it yours. One is that it really affects the way you make decisions rather than just having the intellectual thought process around it.

Yeah. And something I'm noticing here in, in this philosophy of experimentation is it's a little bit less about like experimenting on the world to find out what's out there. It's a lot more experimenting on our experience and how we, how we experience ourselves in the world is where a lot of, a lot of these experiments seem to be kind of focused.

Yeah. I think there's another way to look at it too, which is how do I want to live in the world? For me now, most of my experiments aren't trying to test if somebody else is true or if something somebody said is true. It's more of what's the thought process that actually creates the life that I want to live. If I walk around thinking there's free will, what will that look like? If I walk around thinking there is no free will, what does that look like? How does it feel to be in that thought process? How does it feel to be in that consciousness? So for me, a lot of it is very practical. Of how do I want to exist in this world? What is my authentic expression is a lot of where the experiments come from today.

What makes a well-formed experiment so effective in actually transforming your, your relationship with the world?

It's the same thing as if you fix a car engine, you understand it better than if you just read about fixing a car engine. You have to deal with the bolts and the WD-40 and the leverage to get that one bolt out and all that stuff that happens. Right. So it's very hands-on, it's very personal. And it's, it's the same thing that makes us learn better soccer by actually kicking the ball, not just watching soccer tapes. So that's one of the things. The other thing, a couple other things also. One is it just makes it more playful. You know, we have that episode on failure. And so experiments are meant for a short period of time. It's not something that you tell yourself you should do. It's something that you wonder about. You do it for a short period of time. You have an experience. Does that experience affect your life? Does it change the way you operate? Yes or no. Does it make you want different things? Yes or no. And so off you go. So it's just this constant iteration. There's no failure, potential failure in it. As, so as an example of this, it would be, you want to stop talking all the time in a conversation. Let's say you're one of those people who thinks that they overtalk and you've told yourself for 10 years, stop talking so much, but nothing has changed. It's a lot easier to say, okay, for today, just this conversation, I'm only going to ask questions. And today in this conversation, I'm just going to nod. And in this conversation or this day, I'm going to say everything that I want with like absolute gusto and passion. And this day I'm going to say everything that I want to say, but I'm going to be tentative about it. And so that is going to teach you a lot more about talking or not talking. When it's appropriate to talk, when it's appropriate to listen. And it's, and it's not something where you are going to beat yourself up because you didn't accomplish it. It's just one conversation or one day. You're going to learn so much stuff and you're going to have a felt experience of it. Oh, not talking so much and listening more and asking questions feels really good in this way, but it feels really bad in this way. What time, what times do I want to ask questions? What times do I want to speak less? What times do I want to speak more? And all of that gets learned by doing these experiments.

Yeah, it sounds like one thing you're saying there that this points to is that it takes a lot of the sort of the implicit internal shoulds, the like kind of high pressure, this is so serious default way of approaching something. And then it puts it into our own hands, gives us a chance to play with it and experience it as play. So we still get to play with the structure of how we want to be in the world, but it's really coming from this place of how do I want to be in the world and what are the results of the different ways I'm being rather than just this assumed internal morality of how I should do things to get the results I want.

Yeah. It also opens up the aperture. Oftentimes when we're in shoulds, we have some fear. So we have some binary thinking and it becomes very black and white. And that's really not a great place to learn. Usually the learning is in the nuance. And so you're opening up the aperture, you're looking at the problem from different angles, you're exploring it instead of thinking you know the answer already. And if you did know the answer already, then you would be talking less. But since you're not, you don't. What's interesting is it's very similar. If I just tell you something to do, do this, Brett, you're less likely to do it than if I say to you, what would you like to do around this? And you say, I want to do this. You're more likely to do that. It's the same with ourselves. If we do that, we just don't do it as often as if it's, oh, what do you want to experiment? What do you want to learn? It's just more easy to do. It's more pleasurable. And so we're more likely to do it.

Yeah. And we're more likely to feel in like, we're more likely to enjoy it that way.

Yes, absolutely. Which is one of the other things about experiments is they're just deeply enjoyable. The other thing that it does is that experiments separate your identity when If I think I'm the person who talks too much, it's very hard to become the person who doesn't talk too much because my identity's at stake. But an experiment isn't, doesn't have anything to do with your identity. I'm just going to learn some shit, right? And so I'm just doing some experiments to learn some shit and then I change because I've learned. Also, it's just super efficient, meaning it in, in MIT Media Lab, as I understand it, They have this principle is that if you're going to build something that you don't know how to build, go to the thing you know the least amount about, do the simplest experiment to learn the most about it. And the reason that they do it that way is because usually if I say I was going to build a car, I've never done it before. I'm going to build everything that I know, and then I'm going to build the thing that I don't know. Let's say the chassis. And then once I've built the chassis, I've learned some stuff that will make it so I have to rebuild the whole car to fit to the chassis. And so, and people do the things that they know. That experimentation process teaches you a lot about the thing you don't know, which makes it the quickest way to build the car or build the self-awareness or build the self-discovery or build the life that you want.

Yeah. So I want to get into the process of how we create experiments in our lives. But before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit about mindset with which we can approach experiments. A lot of what we just talked about seems to speak to that, but I want to kind of get concrete on what's the best mindset from which to approach creating, running, iterating, and reflecting on experiments in your life.

Yeah. So the first one is don't make it a fucking should. Like don't make, don't make it a should. Don't, don't make an experiment into something that you should be doing. So you're always looking for a way of finding an experiment and the mindset that makes it playful and fun and a discovery process. It's, it's far more like taking a Sunday drive where you don't know where you're going than it is, I need to get to this place and it's a commute, right? I need to get to work and I need to be there by a certain time to take all that stuff out of it and just wander. So wandering is an important part. Typically the places that we want to wander are where there's pain or where there's curiosity. So, but generally that's, that's important, but there's, there needs to be enough structure where you have some sort of container. So it's, I'm going to do it for X period length of time. I am going to do it for X amount of days. I typically will do something for at least a week because that will teach me a lot. Sometimes I don't need to, I'll say I'll do it for a week, but after 2 days it's so fricking obvious. And then I'll just go to the next experiment that I put on top of it. That's another thing is oftentimes you're building one experiment on the next. And so that's part of the attitude is, oh, I'm just, I want to keep on digging. I want to keep on moving down. The tunnel or keep on going down the rabbit hole. That's a really important one. Make sure that it's not high stakes. Make sure that it's, there's a playfulness to it. And the other thing is keep the identity, as we talked about, keep the identity away from the experiments. So think about it like you're a little kid, but building sandcastles. Yeah, you would like to build a big sandcastle, but like, Your sandcastle's gonna be your sandcastle. The whole shit's gonna be gone in a while. Like, enjoy it. And it's more about like playing in the sand and getting hit by the ocean every once in a while than it is about being identified with the best sandcastle builder in the world. That's the, you know, that's, that's the way to think of it.

Okay, great. So we're like little kids, we're walking along the beach of our life, we're building sandcastles. How do we identify where we want to build our first sandcastle, where we want to run an experiment in our life. Where's the, how do we identify the juiciest place for self-discovery that's also within a window of tolerance that we'll be able to experience it as play?

Yeah. So the most important thing is where you, I wouldn't say the most important thing, but what I'd say is an important thing is where you're going to run the experiment. And it's where your curiosity, where your wonder is, where your pain is. Those are the places typically. Maybe you run into something and you're like, what the fuck was that? I want to learn more about that. And maybe you're just like, I'm smoking. I don't want to be smoking. How do I approach this with an experimental, playful, what do I not know about smoking? What can I learn attitude without I'm doing these experiments to quit smoking. So that would be one is so pain where your desire is, where your wonder curiosity is. That's an important thing. The second thing is make sure that your experiments don't reinforce any kind of like self-abuse. So I've noticed that when people start running experiments, they'll run an experiment that proves that they can't do it, or they'll run an experiment that proves that They're broken in some way. It'll reinforce some sort of shame. So typically I like running the first couple experiments in any area as something that's like completely contradictory to something that I would believe. I don't think that's true at all. I don't— that couldn't be right. And I'll run that experiment.

What would be a good example of that?

Let's just take any topic for a second. Let's say I, um, this is a good one. So running an experiment, not on too much of a development, self-development thing, but on marketing in our business. I hate most marketing, right? Like, I don't. And, uh, the first experiment we ran in marketing was how do we do it exactly the way most people market? Like take that, this state-of-the-art marketing and like complete with timers and pop-up screens. And we did exactly that to see what works about it, what we could learn. There's a lot of intelligence there that has been put into that. There's a lot of people put a lot of time and energy into that. What could we learn? And then how do we make it ours in a way that feels good and to us. So for that would be one example. If you take something that's more in the personal development space, let's take exercise is a perfect example. I remember the first thing is exercise is painful. Okay. How, how do I do an experiment on how to make exercise fun? Because I just hated exercise. I grew up not having to exercise. My parents kept me away from any kind of exercise because I had bad eyesight. They thought I would learn how to be a failure or because they just didn't want to take me to soccer practice every afternoon because they were busy, whatever it was. And so my, my first experiment was how, how can I see if exercise is fun? And so I literally looked at every single calendar, yoga, dance movement, gym, everything I could, every class, dance, you know, and I just tried out like 50 things to see if any of it was fun. So the ex, it wasn't, I'm going to go work out at the gym. It was, I'm going to do the cha-cha-cha on fucking Sunday nights and I'm going to do, you know, contact improv on Tuesdays. And I just experimented until I found stuff that I found was fun, which right now ends up being pickleball. I think pickleball is so fun.

And, uh, yeah, this reminds me of an experiment that I ran a little while ago with, uh, with morning free writing. And the experiment started, of course, as basically just a copy paste of my voice in the head. It was like, I'm gonna wake up in the morning and I'm gonna do free writing for 7 to 10 minutes and like fill a couple pages. And then every morning there was this like, oh, I'm not doing it, or I'm doing it. And this like adherence to the experiment was just another form of the the self-abuse. And so I was noticing that this was happening. I was like, okay, we're going to change the experiment. And instead of telling myself I'm going to do free writing every morning, I'm going to put my notebook and a pen somewhere that I walk by right outside of my, uh, my bedroom. And over the course of time, I wasn't thinking necessarily that I was doing the experiment right. Even I wasn't, I didn't feel like I was adhering to it, but I started to find myself just pick the pen up and paper and walk around in my kitchen and write like 4 sentences while I was in the middle of cooking something. I was like, oh, this is actually integrating into my life. But it wasn't the initial, the initial experiment was not the experiment. And so I want to ask you a little bit more about how once an experiment is designed and we're off and running, assuming that we can assume that's not going to be the final iteration of the experiment. It's probably going to come from some kind of pattern to begin with.

Right, right.

And then, so how do we measure the results and iterate on experiments to, to increase the play, increase the learning, and let the experiment evolve into something that's different from what we've been telling ourselves to do in the past.

Yeah. I think the thing that you just pointed to is really important. So I want to, I want to stay there for just a second. So I wanted to know what it was like to do Kundalini breathwork every morning. For 30 minutes. And I just couldn't, it's just, goddamn, one more thing to do. I've got a busy life. The first thing I'm going to do is wake up and breathe in a way that's uncomfortable. And I just wasn't doing it. And so then my experiment became, I'm just going to do one, one, four, three, three-minute breathwork thing. I'm just going to wake up and do, see what it's like to just do one three-minute breathwork thing. And then I noticed is every time I was there for the first 3 minutes, I was totally happy to do the rest of it. So it was just that little change. And then I was doing 30 minutes of breathwork in the morning and I did that for a couple weeks and, oh, that's what, that's what that does to my life. That's what the world looks like having done that for 2 weeks. And now maybe from that point, I might say, I want to see what it's like for 4 weeks. I want to see what it's like for 6 weeks. I want to see what it's like in the evening. I want to see what it's like. To just do the really powerful breathwork and not the more meditative breathwork, et cetera, et cetera. And so the experiments will just move from there. It'll just be where I'm drawn. And it's just really important to think about. And I think one of the reasons I didn't explain why, why experiments are so powerful is that we have a, like a migratory path in us. We know how we're supposed to evolve. We know how we're supposed to develop. We don't know it consciously, but we know it. Kids know that they're meant to walk when they're, when, when they get to a certain age and they, we do it through mimicry to some degree, but we just know that certain things are supposed to happen the way a bird knows its migratory, migratory path home. And, and so when you're doing an experiment, you're trusting that migratory path. You're not trusting a book, right? I could read a book and I might be able to get one or two big epiphanies out of it. And I read it again 6 months later and I get a different 2 or 3 epiphanies. I couldn't get the other ones 'cause it wasn't where I was on my path. But if you're following that, that, that migratory path, your experiments will be right on your path. So it's, it's always the thing that you're supposed to learn if you're really trusting that. And that takes a little while to hone because you have to listen to that pull, not listen to that should, right? So there's a really important aspect. It's not, how do I overcome this thing? It's, what do I want to wonder about? What do I explore? What do I not know about the pain? And then you're just on that migratory path. And I think that's, that's really critical. And, and that's how it develops. That's how, you know, the next experiment to run. And, and there is a little bit of a discipline to it, which is there's usually a moment. So some of the best experiments is there's this usually this moment of discomfort and you don't want to just jump out of the experiment during that discomfort. You want to embrace intensity, as we say. And the perfect example of this was the story I've told, I think many times about taking out the trash, right? Where I'm, I've got an experiment running where I'm not going to do anything I don't enjoy for whatever it was, 1 or 2 weeks. And I'm sitting there with the trash. I don't enjoy taking out the trash and I don't enjoy the smell of the trash. I don't enjoy the rotting shit that's in the trash. And I'm, fuck, what am I going to do? That's a very tense moment. I know it seems weird, but it's like, no, I guaranteed I wasn't going to do anything I don't want to do. And I don't want to smell this. And I'm not gonna just cheat on my experiment and like, okay, fine, fuck it, and go to the, God, that sucked. But okay, at least the trash is out. Like, what do I do? And so the, the experiments will push you up against that limit. And so when you feel that tension, that's when you don't give up on your experiment. When you feel the, when you feel the should, when you feel the have to, when you feel the identity, that's when you rearrange the experiment, but not when it gets uncomfortable.

Yeah. It sounds like even that, that practice, the sub-practice in running an experiment of how, how long do I stay with a certain structure and how quickly do I iterate according to my migratory flight path? Yeah. Is there's a way that even engaging and wrestling with that can deepen our capacity to recognize what is the migratory flight path feeling and what is the jumping out of discomfort? Feeling.

Correct. That's actually, it's one of the greatest things about doing experiments is that you really have to learn how to listen to yourself in a very particular way. The other thing that's interesting about experiments, running them over a period of time, is that the reason that we do the experiments change and the way we do the experiments change, which are all part of the evolutionary path as well. And So examples of this are when I started, it was a way to show my autonomy, show my sovereignty. Nobody tells me what to do. I'm a rebel. You're an authority figure. Fuck off. I'm going to learn this for myself. Then it became a way for me to really internalize it and see what was mine. And I'm not living against them or for them. I'm not listening to them or not listening to them. I am just following my thing. And now it's very much like a surrender. The experiment shows up and it's like, oh, that's obviously something I have to do. And I surrender into the experiment almost like it's a, you know, it's a traditional guru. Like my experiments are my gurus on some level. And it's just like, I surrender into that experiment. There is a way in which the self gets seen through in every experiment. And part of that is in that deep surrender. Yeah.

So I'm hearing this way that there's a through line that cuts through the way that you approach experiments as you grow, transform, deepen your self-awareness. And I'm also curious, how much have you observed that the content of experiments over time tends to follow similar themes, or do they kind of fly all over the different place? You know, you're doing one with diet, you're doing one with Homework, you're doing one with— like, how, how have you seen, or maybe the better question here is how, how would you recommend people think about the arc of their experiments so that they're developing more momentum with them?

Yeah, I would say don't worry about the momentum. Like, it'll, it'll, that all happens on its own. There's some things that you learn by doing experiments over time. For instance, there was this time when I was doing these experiments that were helping me for a while, and then they would not help me, and then they would help me, and then they would not help me. And then so I do this experiment to great effect, and then it would stop working. And then I do this experiment to great effect and it would stop working. And I realized what was happening was if I did a practice and I didn't know what was going to happen, it worked really well. But as soon as I was using the practice to manage myself, it stopped fucking working. It's very similar to, to, you know, if I'm, if I'm loving an emotion to, to change it, to, to get rid of it, I'm not actually loving it. If I'm, if I am running the experiment to manage myself, I'm no longer running the experiment. It doesn't work. And, and that didn't take, that wasn't one experiment. I learned that because I saw that pattern in like 6 or 7 experiments, which was like this huge teaching for me. That I had never read in any book, which is, oh, if you're trying to manage yourself, it's usually not going to go well for you. You know? And so if you stay in a place of wonder and impartiality and view, which is really the way you're approaching these experiments, that, wow, it works really well. So it's an interesting thing. There's that. Category as well, that, that through line. As far as I don't have a way in which I say I'm going to just do experiments on this for this week and this and this week, I usually just run one experiment at a time. Maybe I have a business experiment and then, and another experiment, my life experiment, but I try not to do too many so I can really savor, focus, understand what's happening, get the most out of the experiment. I just find it's more efficient that way. That's something. And the other thing that's important, and I can see a way to say it now that I couldn't at the beginning of the podcast, which is I'm going to geek out here for a second. One of the reasons that our economy is so robust is because it mimics the way people act. And I say robust, I mean like couple hundred years of up into the right. There's like little wobbles, but generally we're just a growing economy and The reason is, is because it acts like humans. I want to do this. Okay, I can go do this. Oh, let's do this together. It's like kids playing, right? You get 10, 20 kids in a yard and they will move from one playgroup to another playgroup. They will build a fairy house and they will play a ball and then they'll play balls with the fairies and that like they, they, they all do this thing and they're creating different worlds and environments. And that's just like, that's how our, our, our business world works. We're just playing around and like building cool shit. We take it so much more seriously than kids do, but that's really, really similar. You put 100 kids and you put 100 businessmen in a, like in a, in an environment, they're going to basically do the same shit. They're going to come together and they're going to create shit and then they're going to tear shit apart and they're going to compete. And it's just like the same thing that's happening. Experiments. Same way. If you see the experiments work the way humans work, which is let's play, let's experiment, let's build this, let's try this out for a minute. Let's move on to the next thing. Let's evolve. That's how we work. We don't work like this is really serious and we need to get this done and buh, buh, buh. And this is who I am. And I mean, we have those thought processes, but it's not where we're alive. It's not like what, what our nature, what our natural instinct is.

Well, this, this really brings it back to, for me, the something we alluded to earlier about the window of tolerance and, you know, like high-risk situations. And so the economy, for example, it's like, yeah, we're all playing. We're all playing until all of a sudden we're like out of oil and all the carbon's in the sky. And we're like, oh damn. And I could be like, oh yeah, you know, I'm going to be, I'm just going to ask questions in a conversation until, until suddenly I'm in a really high-pressure sales meeting. Or I'm walking up to a girl I'm really attracted to and like, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And so there's something here about how, how we can run an experiment that stays in a window of tolerance, but also pushes our edges just enough so that it expands it. Yeah. I'm curious, how would you approach, like, say, a really high-risk situation, like, like flying a wingsuit through a canyon? Or, you know, running the US government, right? Uh, like the monetary policy or how, how would experiments work in, in those situations so that we stay within a window of tolerance and don't crash the plane?

Yeah, exactly as you're saying, I would create the experiments that are within the window of tolerance as much as possible and do what I know in the other moment. So for instance, if I was running the US government and I'm dealing with, say, like a war in Ukraine, I would want to run a series of lesser experiments to see what I can find out without, you know, committing $10 billion to this weapon or whatever it is. So I would look for, just like we talked about with the MIT Media Lab, I would look for The thing I know the least about and what's the simplest experiment where I can learn the most and not run experiments where there's a lot of fear because they usually don't go well. You know, the, the, the—

you stop running the experimental mindset. So the same experiment then becomes not the experimental. Yeah. Yeah.

That's exactly right. You, you lose the mindset. So on the things that are really important, you do what you know, that you know will work, or you find experts who know what will work and you do it. But in the things that you don't know or the places where you're curious, you figure out that little experiment you can run on the side to learn about things. And I also say that oftentimes that sense of urgency is far greater than it actually is. You know, I'll run experiments in our business that cost us a shit ton of money, and I'd far rather do that than try to get it right. I'd rather feel in connection with like the pull and the migratory path and each other and where our wonder is than I would in trying to get something perfect. And it works really, really well in our business and it, and it has worked really, really well in businesses like early Google or early Microsoft. They ran a lot of experiment. Microsoft is a great example. They ran a lot of experiments that failed. Oh my God. They ran so many, so many businesses that they started and failed at. It was just incredible. And still one of the biggest companies with hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars lost in crazy-ass experiments.

Yeah. It seems like there's something sort of chicken and eggy about the, like the developing the, I'm going to call it faith that you can run an experiment in something that feels more high stakes, feels, feels scarier, asking for more money from clients, drawing boundaries with your partner, experiments that lead to real changes that have real consequences in your life, but developing the, the trust in the process of experimentation such that you're— I've seen, I've seen myself now run 100 experiments and I have a deeper sense of knowing if I'm like we were talking about earlier, following my migratory path or where I'm jumping out of the discomfort and how big my window of tolerance can become and where my edge is, where my playfulness becomes self-protection and the experiment falls apart. And then with that kind of meta-awareness, but also an emotional kind of grounding in it, then you can expand. And trust experimentation, trust that process in more and more high-stakes areas of your life.

I think with that, so I said earlier that the, that it's our nature, like the experimental way of doing things is just how we do things naturally. The other way to say that is like, that's all we're ever fucking doing is running experiments. We're either doing it consciously or we're doing it unconsciously. We either are running the experiment of showing up at the post office every day and working for 8 hours and collecting overtime. And we're running an experiment. Will I keep my job? Will I survive the— will I have to eat a lot of medication to like maintain this lifestyle? We're running all those experiments. We just might not be consciously running them, but we are. Everything we're doing, we are by our nature taking an experiment, living in a certain way, and then deciding at some point. And the only thing that we're doing a little bit differently here is we're keeping it playful. We're making it conscious. We're taking moments to reflect, and that's a really critical component is taking those moments to reflect. How is that going? What am I learning? What's the next thing that I want? Well, if I reflect, what's the thing that's pulling me and how do I go there? Those are the things that are the only things that are different is we're just making an unconscious process very conscious.

Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of what we talked about in our principles episode where we're all operating by certain principles, but many of them are implicit and unexamined. And so when you just bring them into awareness for examination to wrestle with them, to play with them, then they get to evolve and then then you start to develop an explicit trust in the principles that you have been really workshopping and the experiments and in the, in the process that you've been using to do what we do naturally, which is explore and experiment.

That's right. You trust and you're refining the tool. So it's not just, oh, I trust it. It's I have sharpened the hell out of this sword, so I know it'll cut through the bamboo.

Yeah. So what, what's an experiment that you're running right now?

The experiment. So at the beginning of this podcast, you said to me, Joe, I want you to run an experiment for this podcast. I do not know if people will be able to hear it because of the way that this is edited, but I've been noticing that I say the word like a lot. And so every time I heard myself say the word like, I stopped speaking for 2 seconds-ish, took a breath. And then started again. And so, so that was interesting. It definitely made the amount of times that I used the word like less overall, but what I also noticed is that it created a certain presence that, not that it's a good presence or a bad presence, not presence in that way, but like a certain Leave that one in. But a, uh, a presence that has a very specific flavor to it that I don't normally have in a podcast. It, it requires me to stop and think, or not think. It requires me to stop and be with a situation for a moment before just speaking the stuff that comes out.

Hmm. That's awesome.

Yeah. So that, how about you? What was the experiment that you did?

Yeah, mine has been to structure DOMU. So I was like, all right, Joe, here's, here's what we're gonna talk about in the way we're talking about it. We're gonna do this intro and try it this way, even if we have to record it like 8 times and feel like idiots doing it.

Yeah.

And brush your teeth so you're not picking your teeth.

It felt really good. I really have really, really enjoyed you just like taking control and saying, this is how I want things. It, it, it relaxes my nervous system for sure. So I don't know if you enjoyed it, but if you did, please continue. It's great.

Yeah, I did. And it also, I wasn't expecting this cuz it was sort of like a prep Dom sort of, uh, experiment. But what it also did was coming into the episode, I felt more, uh, more in myself in directing the conversation and kind of following it, which made me feel a little bit less like I needed to interject to, uh, to drive the conversation. So there was, I was actually more able to flow with the conversation and with less touch, which felt really nice. And I'm definitely gonna continue playing with—

I noticed that. I noticed that, that, that was true. That's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. And we didn't follow the script or not the script. We didn't, we didn't follow the outline and I'm glad we didn't. We, it's never good when we just straight up follow an outline. No, but it was a, it was a really good iteration. And I, we said all the things that I feel like we wanted to say. Yeah. So, so I want to leave listeners with, with some experiments that they can run in their lives. So where can they go to, to check out any experiments, examples that we've that we've created, and we're gonna be coming up with a kind of experiments miniseries of very short, couple-minute-long episodes that will be sharing experiments, and where can they find them?

Right, so view.life/experiments is where you can find a lot of the tools that we use for experiments, timers or reminders and different little experiments. And then, and I believe that's where we're gonna just start making a list of experiments that people can do. The other thing that I would love is to hear about any experiments that you run on social media. That would be really cool. So anybody who's following me at @fu_johudson at Twitter will be able to see each other's experiments, which I think is really useful. We could, you can also do it with us on Instagram. And then we can share some of those experiments. If I feel like some of the experiments aren't shareable, I'm not gonna share them, but some of them that will be shared. And I would love people to be able to work with each other to figure out some of the experiments that they're running.

All right. Thank you, Joe.

Yeah. Thanks, Brett. And thanks everybody for listening. It's been a good episode being structured-dommed by Brett has worked well for me. All right.

Now I'm gonna structure-dom the audience. Thank you everybody for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. Uh, to hear more about us, join our newsletter, do it, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.

Right now.

Right now. Now. Uh, and, um, or, uh, share it with a friend. Yeah. Do it. Uh, don't forget to follow us. Right now. Don't forget to follow us. And if you have a moment, I would love for you to rate us in your podcast app. Give us 5 stars or 4 stars or whatever number of stars.

5 stars.

We recommend 5. It'll be 5 stars.

5 stars.

Do it. The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by me, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson right here. Monyi Kelly is our production coordinator. This episode was edited by On Replay.

Don't fucking say give us 5 stars or 4 stars or whatever.

Say give us 5 stars on your rating.