This is one of the first few posts on the blog, and despite being really keen to get going I've really struggled to put words on the page. This has been a bit of a surprise to me. I don't usually have a problem with writing. It's one of the aspects of the day job that I most enjoy. However, writing for the blog and for an unknown, potentially unlimited audience, turns out to be pretty intimidating. The scope for making a fool of myself seems pretty big when put in those terms. As a species, we're extremely averse to making a fool of ourselves.
Evolutionary psychology suggests that much of the fundamental wiring in our brains, and hence our underlying functioning, is designed to deal with the kind of small social groups you get in hunter-gather societies, not in the kind of large, complex groups that we encounter as modern humans. The effect of this is that we systematically over-estimate the negative effect of other peoples' opinion of us will have on our lives. The article "Taming the mammoth" on waitbutwhy.com gives a great overview of how this bias comes about.
You really should check out the article above, but I'll give a small example here. Imagine you live in a small, isolated tribe. There's only 150 or so people in the whole tribe, and pretty much everyone knows what happens to everyone else. If you look like a fool in front of those people you will likely limit your access to resources and potential mates (very important to evolutionary psychologists), and you might even get thrown out of the tribe, which could effectively be a death sentence. Furthermore, this is an environment in which even small mistakes could have deadly consequences due to the lack of medical care and other protective factors.
Cut to the modern world and things are very different. There are likely thousands of people within a few miles of where you live, few of whom know each other and even fewer of whom are likely to share any gossip about a mistake of yours. Even if you did do something utterly mortifying, the worst case scenario is that you might have to leave a job, or perhaps start a new friendship or two in order to replace a lost one. Added to that, the physical environment now is far more benign, with mistakes being far less likely to have life-or-death consequences.
This means that you can live your life taking much greater risks than the ancient part of your brain is comfortable doing. That doesn't necessarily mean taking risks for their own sake, though some people seem to enjoy that. I prefer to take a more structured approach.
An experiment is just a event with an unknown outcome that you plan to measure. By taking risks, including social risks with concomitant chance of making yourself look like an idiot, and measuring the outcome of those risks, you can get feedback from the real world about the best course of action. An additional benefit is that framing things as experiments bypasses a lot of the inbuilt anxiety over what people might think about your actions, neatly sidestepping any over-thinking that might occur.
This approach works at both a personal and professional level. It also works, for some organisations at least, at a corporate level. Google has built one of the most successful companies in the world on a process of ongoing experimentation. For a traditional company, a 'failed product' is a major setback and one which might cost people their jobs. At Google, it's a way of better understanding the market and being able to do something more successful next time.
This feels to me like an analogue of the evolutionary perspective on personal risk. For traditional manufacturing companies, a product that doesn't sell is a major setback as it would be a physical product into which a large amount of resources have been devoted. When that goes wrong you might have to, say, bury the evidence in the desert. For an internet company, however, the downside is fleeting and they can just move on to the next thing. On the internet, the benefit of the extra knowledge you gain outweigh the downside of 'failure'.
That's not to say you should aim to fail. Having experiments go spectacularly wrong has become a hallmark of a certain sort of startup, but it isn't necessarily a good strategy.. Research suggests that on a personal and organisational level you learn far more from success than from failure. That's not to say you should be afraid of failing, or taking a calculated risk, simply that it's not worth aiming for failure, if that's even logically possible.
So, how does this relate to my difficulty getting started writing this blog? I've come to see it as an experiment, to see what works and what doesn't. I'll be looking at direct feedback, at traffic, and various other stats to give me a steer on what it is that you as a reader are most interested in. When something I try doesn't work, I'll change course and use that knowledge to improve for next time. That way, I can iterate towards something that people find genuinely useful.
My challenge to you is to look for an opportunity to experiment for yourself. Is there something you think might be worth doing, but which you're holding back over because of lack of certainty? Does it have a relatively low downside if it goes wrong, and is that downside mostly in terms what other people may think? Can you structure it in such a way that'll you'll get good information about how to proceed afterwards, whatever the outcome? With of a bit of reflection you should be able to find something which is amenable to this approach. It doesn't have to be big, or life-changing, and if you're just experimenting with the approach perhaps it shouldn't be. Even if it is something huge, this might be better broken down into a series of smaller experiments. Let us know how you get on with your own experiment in the comments.
The point is, give things a try and use the outcome to guide subsequent action. Don't let your deep-seated concern about failure prevent you from trying new things, and use the structure of an experiment to make sure you get the most information out of whatever it is you do. Go and grab your lab coat!
Evolutionary psychology suggests that much of the fundamental wiring in our brains, and hence our underlying functioning, is designed to deal with the kind of small social groups you get in hunter-gather societies, not in the kind of large, complex groups that we encounter as modern humans. The effect of this is that we systematically over-estimate the negative effect of other peoples' opinion of us will have on our lives. The article "Taming the mammoth" on waitbutwhy.com gives a great overview of how this bias comes about.
You really should check out the article above, but I'll give a small example here. Imagine you live in a small, isolated tribe. There's only 150 or so people in the whole tribe, and pretty much everyone knows what happens to everyone else. If you look like a fool in front of those people you will likely limit your access to resources and potential mates (very important to evolutionary psychologists), and you might even get thrown out of the tribe, which could effectively be a death sentence. Furthermore, this is an environment in which even small mistakes could have deadly consequences due to the lack of medical care and other protective factors.
Cut to the modern world and things are very different. There are likely thousands of people within a few miles of where you live, few of whom know each other and even fewer of whom are likely to share any gossip about a mistake of yours. Even if you did do something utterly mortifying, the worst case scenario is that you might have to leave a job, or perhaps start a new friendship or two in order to replace a lost one. Added to that, the physical environment now is far more benign, with mistakes being far less likely to have life-or-death consequences.
This means that you can live your life taking much greater risks than the ancient part of your brain is comfortable doing. That doesn't necessarily mean taking risks for their own sake, though some people seem to enjoy that. I prefer to take a more structured approach.
An experiment is just a event with an unknown outcome that you plan to measure. By taking risks, including social risks with concomitant chance of making yourself look like an idiot, and measuring the outcome of those risks, you can get feedback from the real world about the best course of action. An additional benefit is that framing things as experiments bypasses a lot of the inbuilt anxiety over what people might think about your actions, neatly sidestepping any over-thinking that might occur.
This approach works at both a personal and professional level. It also works, for some organisations at least, at a corporate level. Google has built one of the most successful companies in the world on a process of ongoing experimentation. For a traditional company, a 'failed product' is a major setback and one which might cost people their jobs. At Google, it's a way of better understanding the market and being able to do something more successful next time.
This feels to me like an analogue of the evolutionary perspective on personal risk. For traditional manufacturing companies, a product that doesn't sell is a major setback as it would be a physical product into which a large amount of resources have been devoted. When that goes wrong you might have to, say, bury the evidence in the desert. For an internet company, however, the downside is fleeting and they can just move on to the next thing. On the internet, the benefit of the extra knowledge you gain outweigh the downside of 'failure'.
That's not to say you should aim to fail. Having experiments go spectacularly wrong has become a hallmark of a certain sort of startup, but it isn't necessarily a good strategy.. Research suggests that on a personal and organisational level you learn far more from success than from failure. That's not to say you should be afraid of failing, or taking a calculated risk, simply that it's not worth aiming for failure, if that's even logically possible.
So, how does this relate to my difficulty getting started writing this blog? I've come to see it as an experiment, to see what works and what doesn't. I'll be looking at direct feedback, at traffic, and various other stats to give me a steer on what it is that you as a reader are most interested in. When something I try doesn't work, I'll change course and use that knowledge to improve for next time. That way, I can iterate towards something that people find genuinely useful.
My challenge to you is to look for an opportunity to experiment for yourself. Is there something you think might be worth doing, but which you're holding back over because of lack of certainty? Does it have a relatively low downside if it goes wrong, and is that downside mostly in terms what other people may think? Can you structure it in such a way that'll you'll get good information about how to proceed afterwards, whatever the outcome? With of a bit of reflection you should be able to find something which is amenable to this approach. It doesn't have to be big, or life-changing, and if you're just experimenting with the approach perhaps it shouldn't be. Even if it is something huge, this might be better broken down into a series of smaller experiments. Let us know how you get on with your own experiment in the comments.
The point is, give things a try and use the outcome to guide subsequent action. Don't let your deep-seated concern about failure prevent you from trying new things, and use the structure of an experiment to make sure you get the most information out of whatever it is you do. Go and grab your lab coat!
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