I first heard the term “self-experimentation” as an undergraduate in behavioral psychology
My professor gave a few examples of his own. He went a month with no sugar, which made carrots taste unbearably sweet. He tried sleeping with his head lower than his feet, which felt miserable and his wife refused to continue. And more.
I think he would have enjoyed teaching an entire seminar about self-experimentation, but he only introduced the concept, and we were left to explore for ourselves.
Which I did.
First through athletics, but then across diet, romance, work, and every other domain, I’ve run thousands of self-experiments.
In 2023, I went more than a month without food. In 2024, I ate three ingredients for five months. I sit in freezing water for several minutes every morning. All from an insatiable desire to answer the question, “What if…?”
In work and throughout our lives, experiments can feel like big endeavors. To lose fat, you need to Diet with a capital D. Gaining muscle is assumed to be hard, with a side of suffering. (For the record, I put on 15 pounds of muscle during my bison and zucchini diet earlier this year.)
In our workplaces, experiments are even harder. As an employee, you might get fired. As a boss, I might get sued.
Experimentation requires enough space to try something new. You have to be able to consider whether this experiment is worth trying, evaluate the potential outcomes, and survive the impact.
But the truth about running an experiment – whether self-experimenting with diet or implementing a new process at work – has huge potential upside.
Start small
Every time I think I’ve fully grokked this idea, I find new dimensions of “starting small.”
Popularized by BJ Fogg and discussed in his book Tiny Habits, the smaller you can make an experiment, the easier it is to try.
Progress comes through small steps that eventually create dramatic change.
As Buckminster Fuller said, “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
Make it reversible
In physical movement, there’s a concept of “reversibility.” A well-executed roll in Brazilian jiu-jitsu can be paused midway through and reversed. All non-dynamic movement can be assessed for quality by whether it can be reversed at any time.
Whenever we changed the menu at Robin’s Cafe, that experiment created some new challenges for my employees who had to learn the new recipes.
But a new menu that is rolled out can also be rolled back, and I could talk to each employee in advance to see how they feel about the new concepts.
In running experiments, ask yourself “Is this reversible?”
Measure impact over the long term
When trying a new diet or implementing a new process, it is natural to want to see changes immediately.
But lasting change doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over weeks, months, and years.
The quicker something is to implement, the more likely it is to flip back to its previous homeostatic state. The longer the period, the more you’re likely to see lasting change.
Measure in decades, not in days.
What did you learn?
Throughout each experiment, ask yourself “What did I learn?”
When experiments fail – like the first and fiftieth time I tried to give up sugar– this is a question that kept me going. And when you are making progress, this is a way to celebrate and expedite progress.
I always want to remain capable of change and reinvention. In business, I aspire to build a learning organization that can equally adapt to our rapidly changing world.
To succeed in the world today, you need to be able to constantly reinvent yourself and your work. That starts with the question, “What did I learn?”
Until next week,
Robin