Conquer fear of failure with experiments

Well, it's late January, and the New Year's Resolutions are starting to decay like Julian Glover at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Resolutions can be fragile. They are often big changes, with only one "win" state. Everything else is "fail." But when you need to make a big change in your life, resolutions can be the way to go. Years ago, I started one to work out regularly, and it probably saved my life.

But most of the time, I run experiments.

Experiments are short term trials of new habits, new ways of thinking, new software, or even when to walk the dogs. Experiments are like making a short term resolution that you can't fail at. Whatever happens in an experiment is okay. The win condition is "try."

Experiments let you gather information and find out what works for you. And when they work, you get to shout "It's alive! It's alive!"

Or maybe that's just me.

Let's start experimenting, right after the news.

What’s going on?

• I just closed all my Meta accounts (Facebook account & 2 pages, 3 Instagrams), and I feel better already. I've hated Facebook pretty much from Day One, and lately the reasons to leave have just been piling up. Here's the article I used to figure out how to exit with all my photos: "How to Delete (or Deactivate) Your Instagram Account."
• If you want to help out LA musicians affected by the fires, and get a bunch of tunes:

Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires, by Various Aritsts

98 track album

StayingJeremy Cherfas

My quarter-year of living experimentally

Last year, I spent a few months living my entire online life on a 13-inch iPad Pro. I'm a minimalist at heart, so the idea of paring everything down to just that sleek tablet was irresistible.

Most of my files were already on cloud storage, so it was easy to move operations over to this new aluminum home. And it worked great. For awhile.

There were a variety of minor irritations in using the iPad as my Always Machine. The biggest problem was screen real estate. You could have multiple apps and windows open, but things got cramped. I was already using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. For whatever reason, I drew the line at plugging in an external monitor.

Surprisingly though, the thing that I couldn't get past is how difficult it is to install new fonts on the iPad. I'm a "type is design" guy, and not being able to grab and install a new font whenever I wanted spelled doom (in one of a limited number of fonts) for the whole switching-to-an-iPad thing.

So, the iPad experiment was a failure, right?

Not at all, because:

Failure is always an option

That's a famous quote from Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame. It started as a joke, and then he realized it had a deeper significance:

A scientist doesn't do an experiment to get to a specific result. They conduct an experiment to learn something. Every experiment yields data, even if the data is how not to conduct the experiment.

I'm not a scientist, but moving to the iPad was an experiment. If it had worked out, then yeah, I probably would have wiped my Mac Mini's disks and recycled the thing. But when the experiment didn't work, I just plugged the Mini back in, and went back to using it as my primary machine.

So the iPad move could be declared a failure. But the experiment was a success.

In fact, experiments have multiple success conditions:

So what kind of change makes a good experiment?

First, do no harm

A good experiment is simultaneously daring, and risk-free. You need to be able to easily move on from any of the results shown in the table above. Back up your data first. Have alternate resources ready if things go completely sideways. Don't start an experiment in the middle of a time-critical project.

And make sure no one else is depending on the results of your experiment. Because then it's not an experiment, it's an obligation. I wasn't fixing anyone's heart valve, or getting the Apollo 13 crew back home safely. I was just trying out something with my iPad.

I started my iPad experiment in a quiet point of my production schedule. And I kept my Mac Mini ready to go. When I decided to go back to the Mini, it cost me a little time to reset things, but not much.

Speaking of cost, remember Thoreau's advice:

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

I already had the iPad and the cloud storage. My experiment had no up-front expenses, just time and effort. The best experiments use the equipment you already have.

Use "why" to start the next experiment

Experiments also help you focus in on what you actually want – the "why", as in "why do you want to work on the iPad?" This is especially useful if you try an experiment that doesn't result in the outcome of "It worked/It's a good fit for you: keep going."

For instance, last month I started an experiment of walking our two corgis first thing every morning. And I mean first thing: I'd wake up before everyone in the house, put on some clothes, and the dogs and I would head out the door before breakfast. They loved it.

But after a couple of weeks, I had to rate the experiment as "It doesn't work/It's a good fit for you: use the results to set up a new experiment."

Walking the dogs was a good thing. They were calmer during the day, and I was getting more much-needed exercise. So it was a good fit for all three of us.

The problem was that the dogs still needed work on not pulling on the leash. And it was training that had to be done 1 on 1. There needed to be two people walking them. So we've started a new house-wide experiment where the dogs are walked later in the morning, when there's another walker awake. It's a new experiment, based on the same "why," namely that those crazy critters need their walks!

Are the other approaches we could take? Of course! And if this experiment doesn't work, we will probably try them. One experiment at a time.

Fun facts to know and share

It's just music and fun this week:

Over to you

I'm running an experiment right now that you can try, too:

1. Memorize (or copy onto a sticky note) this table:
   0 = 32
   10 = 50
   20 = 68
   30 = 86
   40 = 104
   50 = 122
   (As you've probably already surmised, this is a table of Celsius/Fahrenheit equivalents. )
2. Now start the experiment by switching your weather app to Celsius, and use the numbers above to make "close enough" guesses of the temperature in Celsius.
   
   For instance, our recent low temps have been around -2 ℃, which is high twenties in Fahrenheit, I guess? And the high today was 7 ℃, which is more than halfway between 32 and 50, so I'm thinking that's mid 40's Fahrenheit.

Yeah, it's not exact, but it gets me one step closer to the measuring system 95% of the world uses. Let me know if it works for you.

Until we talk again, I remain,

Your pal,

Jamie