The Importance of Experiments in Lifestyle Design

Most advices don’t work because they are not meant for you

How much is free unsolicited advice flowing in the online world?

Most of us are guilty of giving this advice or taking them from people who don’t know about our challenges.

Every post you read, every video, every podcast episode we consume has a copious amount of advice. I am guilty of giving advice to random strangers when I started my journey as a creator on Quora.

With time I learned how useless and bogus some of these advices were.

How innocent or even dumb do we become by the following advice from people who don’t know what we’re going through?

I was exhausted with the self-advice (taking and giving both). I am guilty of doing it, and I followed the hustle culture up to a level that burnt me out. I worked 16–17 hours a day, and my inner Elon Musk was proud of me. But I was losing the essence of life. Luckily, I got out of that lifestyle and learned about being a human rather than a working machine.

I had to find a middle ground between hustling and flowing with life. What I was looking for was not available anywhere online, which meant I had to carve out a unique path for myself.

In Four Hour Work Week, author Tim Ferris talked about building a lifestyle that you want to live. It’s the concept of creating a life based on your goals and happiness. Lifestyle design is different for each person, like fingerprints. The lifestyle which you design for yourself won’t work for your best friend or your mom.

You can dream about living a life that only requires four hours of work every week, but whom are you kidding. That lifestyle doesn’t work for most of us when we’re just starting out.

So, how do you know how to design a life that is exclusively for you?

Let’s see what most people do.

• A self-help book is written for millions of people. Would it address your specific problem?
• Hiring a coach. Well, the coach may give you a roadmap and be a cheerleader, but they won’t know what you’re going through.
• You can never be that honest to any other being. It covers your coach, your parents, and your spouse.

What else can you do?

We do what the marketing team does.

We run experiments.

Why Experiments?

Life is a journey of self-discovery. You’ll have to find your way out of it. People can help you, support you, but they can’t take those steps for you.

I have been a firm believer in experimentation and experiencing things firsthand instead of relying on the sources available to you. The worst is listening to people around you.

I grew up considering breakfast the most important meal of the day. It was considered a crime to leave home without eating breakfast. When I experimented with my diet and found out my body works best when I follow 16/8 intermittent fasting, I had to let go of my 24 years of breakfast habit.

We all have been primed about so many things, and we can only know if it’s true or not when we experiment with them with an open mind.

It’s a scientist outside the laboratory.

All of our stories are different; what helped me live better may turn out to be fatal for you. What is killing me may be a blessing for someone else. As our uniqueness, the solution to our problems is also unique.

“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.” — Denis Diderot

Nullius in Verba

Every year I try to pick up a topic that I want to truly “immerse myself in”.

2020 was supposed to explore the remote places in and around Karnataka and learn their culture, but it turned into a survival quest.

2021 was about experiments. Settling in the new life and trying experiments that’d help me sustain staying in.

I learned the Latin phrase Nullius in Verba while listening to a podcast, and it fits perfectly with the ideology of the experimental approach towards life.

The phrase means “on the word of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it.” It gives you a chance to experience from first principles and not take advice or no for an answer.

Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” When we try to get out of our comfort zone, our assumptions get in the way. When we try to eliminate such premises and beliefs forced by society, and our parents challenge us.

First-principles thinking allows us to think from a blank canvas and draw a new painting from scratch.

Instead of handicapping your ideas, focus on the possibilities.

How to Apply it

To follow the personal experiments route, you find a tailor-made way for you, and you’ll have to become an empiricist.

An empiricist is a person who believes in using methods based on what is experienced or seen rather than on theory. This is the philosophy of Empiricism. It states all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.

These experiments don’t have to be massive life changes. They can be as small as changing your coffee intake. A few examples.

• If you have an idea you love, but people call it stupid, asking FIVE WHY’s will change your approach. It’s creating a cross-training way to get to the root of an issue.
• If you don’t know how caffeine affects your body, instead of reading a blog about it, try to experiment with drinking tea for a week and see how it makes you feel.

You’d never be able to understand the lesson, the concert, and the challenge if you don’t try it yourself. And it applies to all areas of your life.

Nobody is a better example of experimentation than Elon Musk. In his own words:

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. With analogy, we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. With first principles you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”

Conclusion

Eating processed food takes 2 minutes but cooking a healthy well-cooked meal takes time. The same applies to the ready-made guides and running personal experiments to find the solution that will help you.

Be an empiricist before being a follower, and you’ll see a shift in your life. As English poet, William Blake once said.

“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

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