1 day less than exactly 11 weeks ago, I started a list. I called it, The 100 Public Experiments Experiment. I added a description as follows:
Description: This is exactly what it sounds like. I’m going to try 100 public experiments, as an experiment. I’m not going to define what a public experiment is or mandate any criteria, but expect some emergent characteristics may become clear as I do them. I won’t define an objective either. My hypothesis is simply that this is worthwhile.
I added bullets for the first dozen or two that came to mind -- an aggregation of ideas I'd had previously. Then, in the weeks that followed, I added a bullet to the list any time I had an idea that seemed like it belonged. The chapter, Seeds, from Rick Rubin's new book, The Creative Act, provides an excellent description of a similar process. I read that a few weeks after starting my list and could not believe how much it seemed like he was describing what I was doing. But that's not what this post is about, and his chapter is great, so if you want to learn more about this, just go and read that.
What you should know is that my list is now 78 bullets long and I have intentionally kept from going through it until today. I have only been adding bullets to the bottom (and perhaps seeing my few most recent bullets by accident, since they're on the screen).
Now, bear with me for a brief detour...
10 days ago, I tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/0FJAKE/status/1674820528232710148?s=20
As a result, several people DM'd me. I quickly booked 7 "Life Advice" calls for later this month.
That was the detour. Now, back to the list.
Today, I decided to review my list of experiments from top to bottom for the first time since I started it. I started at the top but didn't get to the bottom. As a matter of fact, I didn't get past the first bullet. I had to go and write this blog post. Why? Because of what the first bullet said:
Life coach calls
Now, I know this might be one of those "had to be there" or "had to be me" moments which is hard to appropriately appreciate since you're not me and you weren't there, but let me try to explain. For more than 2 months, I had intentionally resisted reading this list because I wanted to stay in collection mode before moving on with selection & execution. Little did I know that 10 days ago I started executing on the list, beginning with the very first bullet!
Think about that. 77 bullets and an infinite number of unlisted experiments and the first one that I started on a whim happened to be the very first bullet on the list. I should say, I am not totally surprised that something like "Life coach calls" was on the list. Life coaching in general is something I have thought about for a while, just like many of the bullets on this list. But I certainly had no conscious memory of the fact that that was the first item. I was so serendipitously surprised to see it there that I felt compelled to write this. And by now I've realized that this is a bit of a difficult thing to communicate and that those who know what I'm talking about will get it but those who don't probably won't. That's okay. Maybe just trust me on this one and start writing things down.
I am convinced that there exists a mysterious power in writing things down. I don't know exactly how it works or why it works but I do believe that it works. I have experienced it myself, and I have read about it from others who experienced it themselves. Scott Adams wrote about one version of this which he calls affirmations in his worth-reading book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Napoleon Hill and OG Mandino suggest similar practices in their books, Think and Grow Rich and The Greatest Salesman in The World, respectively. The second of those books I first heard about from Matthew McConaughey who I recall had some experience like this himself. I am having a hard time finding the reference from his book but I think he once wrote down that he was going to be an Oscar-winning actor, before he had even started acting, and rediscovered that note many years after writing it, after he had won an Oscar (or something like that).
I like writing things down. Obviously, I have written a lot here on this blog. Writing one page in a morning journal and making frequent use of the Notes app are two of my longest standing habits. I don't have a formula or a step-by-step for you to follow. I am simply suggesting that you write things down more. You may rediscover something you wrote many years after writing it and be as surprised as I was earlier today, which is why I am writing this down.
