image
image
image

Chapter 20: Adopt the Experimental Approach

image

Whenever you set high expectations and assume you can’t lose, you set yourself up for a potential knock-out-like blow of discouragement. When you repeat this behavior frequently, you will rapidly deplete your resources of willpower.

I frequently hear entrepreneurs saying things like: “Even if I only convert 1% of visitors to my website — and this is unlikely, as I’ll surely convert 2% or 3% — I’d still make a lot of money.” They forget that there are numbers lower than 1%, and their conversion rate might be 0.3%, 0.05%, or even 0%. When they don’t reach their goal, they feel bitter and angry. After all, even in the most pessimistic scenario they should have been rolling in it now.

In the opening words of this book, I talked about my failures from investing in video courses. Despite losing a lot of money, I mentioned that I didn’t feel angry or particularly disappointed. I protected myself against those emotions because I used a certain strategy that we’re going to talk about now.

While it’s good to have high hopes and set big goals, this applies primarily to objectives you’re already knowledgeable about, as you can more or less accurately calculate your odds. However, even then, you should still account for the fact that failure is always a possibility and nobody has an innate golden touch.

For this reason, if you aren’t entirely sure about a certain goal of yours, it makes sense to approach it as an experiment.

I set aside a portion of my monthly business budget to run new experiments. Instead of expecting loads of money coming my way from every single new endeavor, I consider the money I invest in a new idea as money spent to learn. I don’t expect a fast return (if any). If I make a return, great. If not, it was an experiment anyway, and there’s nothing to be angry about.

Such an approach doesn’t mean I don’t try my best to make it work; it’s just a mind hack that helps me overcome fear of failure and reduce performance anxiety. It’s crucial to instill in your mind that the money (or other resources you use) is lost from the start of the experiment. You can use the word “invested” instead of “lost,” but don’t fool yourself — if it’s an experiment, prepare yourself to lose it all.

This simple tweak in your attitude will prevent you from procrastinating out of fear or becoming discouraged when you fail. After all, it was an experiment, without a guaranteed positive outcome.

Note that this strategy can increase your chances of success because, if you consider your new undertaking an experiment, you’ll be more willing to approach it as a scientist, tweak your approach, change certain variables, and find a winning mix.

In business, setting aside a part of your budget for experiments will make you more likely to innovate and achieve unexpected big wins. He or she who sows more, reaps more.

This master strategy isn’t limited only to business, though. In sports, ego often plays a key role. You don’t want to lose or perform badly, so you avoid uncertain and difficult things.

In rock climbing, I often convince myself to approach routes I feel apprehensive about by telling myself it’s just an experiment. When I don’t expect to climb a difficult route, I can forget about bad performance and simply focus on performing my experiment — and whether it ends during my next move or at the top of the route is irrelevant. What matters is that I tried something new.

I used to tell myself the same thing when fighting against my shyness. I would approach a female stranger, telling myself it was just an experiment. I could only gain from the experience. Since I wasn’t expecting a “return on my investment,” I could approach her with little to no fear: it didn’t matter if I was rejected or not. The experiment ran its course regardless of what happened, just like scientists don’t stop an experiment because they don’t like its results.

Adopting the experimental approach is crucial for long-term goals because they take numerous attempts to achieve. You most likely won’t succeed with your first business idea, and chances are you won’t succeed with the second one, either. If you approach both attempts as experiments, you’d be more likely to keep going than if you assumed right away that your first idea would make you a millionaire.

Again, it’s good to have positive expectations, but for the purpose of maintaining long-term determination, it makes sense to treat your efforts as experiments. They may deliver the results you’re after, but if not, they can help you discard the wrong approach without feeling like you failed.

Change Doesn’t Have to Be Permanent

Successful entrepreneur Noah Kagan points out in his interview with popular blogger Tynan that change doesn’t have to be permanent,[48] It’s hard to make daunting changes if you believe you can’t back out of them.

Think of your big decision as an experiment that you can conclude at any moment, and it will cease to be daunting or impossible to revert.

If you want to switch to a plant-based diet, the thought that you’ll never be able to eat meat, fish, or eggs again makes it pretty much impossible for most people to take such a decision. How about going on a plant-based diet for only a month or just a week and seeing how you feel?

If you want to start your career as a freelancer, you don’t have to give in your notice at your job and go for broke. How about applying for a couple of small gigs and working on the weekends to test the waters?

Don’t overthink it. Find a way to introduce a big change in your life with little commitment and investment on your part. If it works well, make it a permanent change. If you don’t like it, stop doing it. There’s little you can lose, and a lot you can potentially gain.

You’re in control of how much of a risk you want to take with your decisions. You can dip your toes in the water and invest as little as possible, or you can place a larger bet that will result in a bigger win or a more painful loss.

When I started out with my self-publishing business, I ran small experiments. I decided to spend $50 instead of $10 to design a cover or risk $50 to test a new promotional service. Note that safe experiments don’t always come with limited upside. Spending just $40 more on a professional book cover comes with little risk, while it can potentially dramatically increase sales.

Later on, when I had more money and my “risk muscle” became stronger, I started running bigger experiments. Recently I spent several thousand dollars on hiring a business consultant. In the end, I realized that the solutions offered to me by the consultant weren’t right for me in the long term.

I decided to cut my losses, which meant losing the money I’d already invested in hiring the consultant, as well as refunding money to people who had pre-ordered the product I had started working on.

Prior to starting this experiment, I knew that the potential upside was big, but I was also fine with the fact that if it did not work out, I’d lose a lot of money. In the end, the experiment was still worth it, as it helped me clarify the long-term direction of my business.

People often give up on their goals, not because their experiments fail, but because they don’t run them at all and consequently, don’t evolve.

If it weren’t for my numerous experiments in my self-publishing business, I wouldn’t have become a bestselling self-published author. My losses amount to thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of my time, but my wins are a healthy multiple bigger.

Embrace experiments, and even if most of them fail, you only need one or two to score big wins.

EXERCISE #14: DEVISE AN EXPERIMENT

Is there anything that could help you achieve your goal, but you’re afraid of doing it because you fear you’ll lose money or time or get discouraged if it were not to work out?

Approach it as an experiment. Run it with the sole intention of gathering data for a short period of time so that it isn’t overwhelming. If you don’t have a good tolerance for risk, start as small as you can and gently exercise your risk muscle along the way.

Set a budget: it can be in monetary terms ($500 to test a new marketing channel), time (4 weeks of following a new diet), quantity (write 20,000 words to see if you can write a short story and become a professional writer), and get started.

Your goal is to run the experiment until you gather enough data to draw good conclusions. Consider the experiment successful as long as you gain useful information from it.

ADOPT THE EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH: QUICK RECAP

1. Setting high expectations and never taking into account the fact that you can lose can lead to discouragement if you fail. The solution is to adopt the experimental mindset, in which you consider a new undertaking an experiment. Your goal ceases to be about achieving success; it’s about testing your hypothesis.

2. To conduct a successful experiment, set a budget (choose a specific amount of resources you’ll dedicate to it, be it money, time or energy) and run it until you get solid data.

It’s important to approach it as a short-term experiment. Even if you’d like to introduce a new change permanently, it’s a good idea to run it as an experiment first for a limited period of time. This will transform the daunting big decision into a less overwhelming little experiment.