validated learning

Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy
Finding what fits you best in order to design the perfect life you want and deserve takes a lot of experimenting. You have to try dozens of different things to find the one that works perfectly for you as a unique individual. In addition to that, “fits” are not a static thing. Your values, environment, the type of opportunities that you’re exposed to and the things you appreciate change over time. That means experimenting must be done constantly.

Experimenting is fun by itself and you can enjoy many benefits doing it, but it’s also demanding and expensive. It takes a toll on your emotions, because you usually have to face a series of small failures in the beginning and you often need to invest at least some money into performing an experiment; besides time, energy and creativity, which are always needed.

Every experiment does give you a lot – a diverse life experience, gaining insights about yourself and your environment, having lots of fun and putting your creative self to use. Nevertheless, only experimenting is never enough. The end goal of experimenting is to move forward and to progress much faster towards your goals. Experiments must lead you to validated learning that enables you to shape a superior life strategy.

The sooner you shape a superior life strategy, the better off you will be in life. The idea of how to get to massive success is to move fast and learn fast. You have to conduct experiment after experiment until you nail it.

You have to experiment all the way until you can finally move from the search mode into the execution mode. The problem is that a high frequency of many different types of experiments leads to using a lot of resources. And you don’t want to drown before you succeed.

Luckily today with all the technology and tools available, you can do many experiments fast and they don’t cost a lot of money. The concept is known as rapid prototyping and it’s used in business all the time. In this article, you will learn how to use the same principle in your personal life.

The main idea is very simple. With rapid prototyping in personal life, you want to get to the minimum viable experience as quickly as possible using the fewest resources. Before we go to many different ideas for using rapid prototyping in personal life, let’s quickly overview the main theory behind prototyping.

Prototyping and rapid prototyping

You’re probably familiar with the word prototype. A prototype is a simplified early working model of a final product that demonstrates the key functionalities and benefits that the final product will provide.

A prototype can be built to test if an idea even works, it can be built to explore additional ideas, for demonstration purposes and learning as much as possible about how to improve the final product so that the targeted segment will really use it.

When building a prototype, the most important goal is to gather all the data and specifications to build a real working product in the next step. Prototyping is always far away from only talking about theoretical ideas. It’s the first big step towards realizing an idea. It means taking a theoretical idea and materializing it in its simplified form, so you can start learning how well the idea fits into the world.

Prototype is a simulation of the final product so you can start learning as quickly as possible.

We know low-fidelity prototypes that are really basic draft versions of a product. They are often only paper based and don’t allow any real interaction between a user and a prototype. The main goal of low-fidelity prototypes is to visualize solutions, explore alternative versions and encourage additional ideas. They are extremely inexpensive and can be built fast.

And then we also know high-fidelity prototypes, which are much more perfected, exact and evident. They allow test groups at least some interaction and are much more effective in getting feedback. Their problem is, of course, that they demand more resources to be build.

We also know different kinds of prototypes to gather different kinds of data and do different kinds of tests. There are proof-of-principle prototypes, the goal of which is to prove that an idea can work in real life. Then we have visual prototypes to get a good visual representation of how the final product would look like. A user experience prototype simulates the user’s experience with the final product. A functional prototype, on the other hand, puts visual representation and features to the test.

With technology developing fast, there is a relatively new technique called rapid prototyping (wiki) that’s becoming more and more popular. With rapid prototyping, you can very quickly build a scale model of your final product or many different versions of it. With techniques like 3D printing, you can basically print dozens of different ideations fast.

Besides 3D printing, there are many other awesome tools, apps and approaches that enable you to bring models and other representation types of your ideas to life inexpensively and while your ideas are still hot.

Rapid prototyping means that you can test many different ideas in a short time frame, gather all the necessary feedback and move fast towards the solutions that work the best.

Don’t talk about it, do, try, experience or show.

Get educated and then start experimenting as quickly as possible

There are several prototyping phases or, to be more exact, steps before you start prototyping. The standard phases are:
- Understand
- Observe
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
In the understand, observe and define phase you gather all the data needed to start prototyping. In this phase it’s most often necessary to get well educated. There are rare exceptions when you want to take a fresh look on an old thing, but many times extensive research and acquiring knowledge helps a lot.

When you have the basic knowledge and landscape, you can better orientate yourself towards what exactly you want to achieve and find out by experimenting. You also have an understanding of what other people have already tried, and even more importantly what they have missed.

Especially when experimenting in personal life, it’s extremely important to get very well educated and completely understand the risk, rewards, investments needed and the process. When you understand all these things, you can put your creative mind to work. After you get educated and brainstorm all the potential ideas, the goal you want to achieve with prototyping in personal life is to get a real-life experience as soon as possible.

When designing a prototype, you try to get to the minimum viable experience as soon as possible with the fewest resources with which it can be done. The sooner you start building, the more motivated you are, and immediate implementation enables you to start learning from the beginning of the process.

When you’re in the prototyping phase, you should also explore several options and ideas. You mustn’t get emotionally attached to only one potential solution. After defining your hypotheses and ideas for how you will perform an experiment, you have to start prototyping different solutions, test them and move on before you get fixed on any specific ideas.

In the prototyping phase, you must keep your divergent thinking active, you must completely shut down your inner critic and keep your mind open.

When you’re prototyping you are looking for two things – the ways to (1) improve current ideas and (2) completely new ideas. The first approach is called serial prototyping, which is a progressive method of upgrading known ideas. It means that you are looking for new versions of the same solutions.

The second approach is called parallel prototyping, where you are looking for ideas in completely new directions. You are looking for something that doesn’t exist yet at all.

Minimum Viable Experience is a process of idea generation, prototyping, presentation, data collection, analysis and learning about yourself and your environment.

No matter if you are doing serial or parallel prototyping, you want your prototypes to be simple, provide rapid feedback, help you embrace change and, last but not least, prototyping should be fun. You may be more limited when you’re experimenting and prototyping in personal life than when you are dealing with business ideas, because you’re rarely building a new product, but instead you just want to experience something new.

Nevertheless, if you are creative enough, there is always a way to acquire new experiences without diving in fully and risking everything. Even in personal life there is always a way to first test something in a controlled way with some kind of a prototype.
The most important knowledge and feedback you’re looking for from conducting experiments with prototypes are:

Main insights

What worked

What didn’t work

New questions and doubts

New ideas for experiments

New ideas in general
Examples of rapid prototyping in personal life

The main goal of performing an experiment in personal life is very simple. You want to learn in a very controlled environment or in a very controlled way if something (an idea) works as planned, or you want to better understand how the world works.

You want to get one step closer to the objective truth and get rid of your subjective cognitions and wrong assumptions. You do that by employing the search mode concept and undertaking a scientific approach to experimenting.

You set hypotheses, define how you will collect and analyze data, and then you perform experiments and draw conclusions. Consequently, you validate or disprove your hypotheses. That leads to validated learning and insights.

You can make decisions and take actions based on more accurate data. Prototyping is one of the ways how you can perform the data-gathering part of an experiment. Luckily, there are many different types of prototypes that can help you achieve that.

Below are listed the most popular prototyping techniques together with a few ideas for how you can use each technique in your personal life.
1. Genchi Genbutsu
2. Pen and paper
3. Mockups and models
4. Wizard of Oz test
5. Storyboards and use cases
6. Video prototyping and simulations
7. Role-playing
8. Mind-mapping
9. Scenarios and flow charts
10. Templates and guidelines
Genchi Genbutsu

Genchi Genbutsu is not really a prototyping technique, but the main way of experimenting in personal life. It’s means “go and see” or “go out of the building” to gain first-hand knowledge. In other words, try it and see for yourself whether something works for you or not.

The highest number of experiments you’ll probably do in life are the ones where you try and experience something new and then observe metrics – either your body metrics, your feelings, your capabilities or any other type of life metrics. You try a new behavior and then observe yourself and your environment. In today’s times, you can try many different things easily and inexpensively. All you need is a little bit of courage.

Practical examples

You can try many different sports, diets, types of arts and everything else life has to offer. You live in the best times ever to discover yourself and find the things you are really good at and that you enjoy. You can test different kinds of behaviors in real life and what kind of feedback they give you, you can test different types of habits, technology and careers.

There are almost no limits to what you can try. You can rent an expensive bike for a downhill ride. You can join a hobby group and try any kind of art or other discipline. You have so many resources to try coding. You can join an afternoon project in an industry you’re attracted to. Genchi Genbutsu.

Pen and paper

Using pen and paper is the fastest and cheapest form of prototyping. It can be done anywhere and anytime, as long as you have paper and a pencil somewhere at hand – which I absolutely recommend that you do. When an idea comes to mind or when you need to develop one, you simply sketch it on paper. As an alternative, you can also use the origami technique to present some ideas with paper.

The freedom of pen and paper often encourages experimentation and generation of new ideas. There is a special connection between your mind, hand and pen. You don’t have to be Picasso to sketch, it’s only about giving shape to your ideas and doing many iterations fast. Nobody will judge your prototypes.

Practical examples

You can use pen and paper to brainstorm ideas. You can use pen and paper to do self-reflection and understand yourself better. You can draft a flat or a house you desire. You can draw a persona or write an essay about your perfect spouse or ideal self.

You can easily draw a table with all the pros and cons for a certain decision so you can decide more easily. You can outline what kind of a personal blog you’d like to have. You can try to write a poem or a love letter. You can sketch different ideas.

Mockups and models

Mockups are slightly advanced representations of ideas. They are 3D illustrations or models that represent the core design and simulate at least some functionalities of the final product. Mockups are an extremely popular design prototyping technique. There are many different types, like models or even wireframes that represent an idea of how a website should work.

You can use many different approaches and techniques to do mockups. You can use different software applications, you can build physical models from cardboards, paper, woods and other materials. Not to forget 3D printing. You can take advantage of to print actual models of the ideas you have.

Practical examples

I’m currently testing a standing desk with nothing but a simple model. The model is made out of a wardrobe and a rack. Many do-it-yourself things would fall into this category of prototyping. From office organization and storage solutions to 3D printing of the things you like, there are many ways to use simplified solutions, models, mock-ups and creative innovations instead of buying expensive products and solutions.

At this point, we should also mention crowdfunding and crowdsourcing ideas to get feedback from the community or even to fund your ideas. Today you can easily show your ideas to the world and get immediate feedback. With Minimum Viable Products, you can also easily test market interest for your ideas.

Wizard of Oz test

The idea behind the Wizard of Oz test is that you somehow fake a functionality you want to build. You do that primarily to save resources. The technique is used extensively in software development.

For example, you can test a new software functionality, but instead of coding it and having a computer perform the functionalities and all the interactions, it can be done by a human with remote control technologies. A tester doesn’t know that, of course.

Practical examples

Examples of Wizard of Oz tests in personal life would be to inexpensively try something you want in order to see if it really brings you happiness. Rent a Ferrari for a day and imagine it’s yours. Try to live in a foreign country for a month before you finally move there. Go to a tech store and spend an hour playing with a computer you want to buy.

Or, for example, you can learn 100 most popular phrases of a new language, try to use it on the street and see how it feels to speak a new language. Sometimes you can fake it until you make it; or decide to not make it at all, because it’s not for you.

Storyboards and use cases

With a storyboard, you can describe the whole desired user experience through a series of sketches and images. Storyboards are a great way to brainstorm additional ideas, think of alternative scenarios and all the ways how things can go right or wrong.

You can also use storyboards to describe different use cases of ideas and products; or you can employ use cases as a standalone prototyping technique.

Practical examples

A Kanban board is kind of a storyboard representing your sprint or to-do list. You can use a storyboard to describe how you could/should act in certain situations – when your boss criticizes you, for example. You can outline all the ways how you could use a specific product or how certain ideas could improve your life.

You can use storyboards to prepare yourself for public appearances or how you will tell your kids a story in the best way possible. You can sketch life stories with storyboards. And you don’t need any drawing skills for storyboards, there are many online solutions that can help you with that.

Video prototyping and simulations

The idea of video prototyping is that you illustrate your main idea using video or by making a movie. You can prepare a short movie or a different kind of visual representation. An alternative to videos are also interactive or non-interactive simulations.

Practical examples

Make a video of your perfect life or your perfect self. Design a short motivational video clip on the topic of why you want to be rich. Prepare a video as part of your CV. Open a YouTube channel to connect with like‑minded people. Prepare a video simulation of your dream house.

Role-playing

Role-playing is a great way to develop empathy. You take on a role of another person and try to experience a situation or use a product from their perspective. It helps you understand their point of view. When you’re role-playing, it makes sense to focus on what the person you are impersonating would say, do, think and feel.

Practical examples

You can role-play with your spouse to better understand each other. You can play a role of what kind of a person you would be with a certain characteristic you currently don’t possess and how your life would unfold in the future (the so-called Fixed Role Therapy). You can role-play an action you’re afraid of doing, especially involving authorities that make you freeze up.

Mind-mapping

Mind-mapping means using diagrams to visually organize information. It allows you to represent different hierarchies and relations between elements. Mind-mapping is a great way to brainstorm ideas and outline complex structures. It’s also a very suitable technique for how your brain works. Many smart people use mind maps to learn faster, brainstorm and do analytical work.

Practical examples

You can use mind maps for brainstorming ideas, breaking down complex subjects or grasping the main ideas of the book you just read.

You can use mind maps for strategic planning, personal project management, problem solving, job searching, as a life planner, to-do list, travel plan, risk management or even a personal training plan. There are basically unlimited options for how you can use mind maps.

Scenarios and flow charts

Flowcharts are used to explain a process, algorithm or workflow. Steps of the process are visualized with boxes and arrows showing connections between different steps.

An important part of every process are also decisions that need to be taken in order for the process to be completed one way or another. Decisions are usually visualized in diamond-shaped boxes in the chart. By using a flowchart, you can easily understand the process from the beginning to the end.

Scenarios, on the other hand, aren’t diagrammatic representations of a process, but a written description of a sequence of desired events, illustrating all the activities that need to be performed in the real-world environment to achieve a specific goal.

With scenarios, you can describe in detail how a certain system, process or application already works and why it’s important, or you can describe hypothetical scenarios of what could happen in different settings with different products, knowledge, people etc.

Practical examples

You can prepare a flowchart of how you will get your job or find your perfect spouse. You can combine the flowchart technique with the AARRR funnel. You can prepare a flowchart for how you will get fit or rich or prioritize what you will learn first in your hour of power.

With flowcharts, you can define different milestones in your relationships or life in general, analyze in which directions your big decisions could lead you or prepare a step-by-step career development plan.

You can do pretty much the same by using scenarios as you can do with flowcharts. It all depends on which technique works better for you. With scenarios, you can prepare detailed descriptions of how your life would look like in different settings; for example, if you lived in a flat or a house.

You can develop alternative paths for your life when you’re making big decisions to have detailed representations of where each decision would lead you. You can prepare scenarios as an input for visualization.

Templates and guidelines

Templates and guidelines are a kind of framework for better decision-making or performing certain actions in a very standardized way. A template is a layout that you can use over and over again to save time, energy, decision-making power and other resources.

Guidelines are nothing but general rules, pieces of advice and principles that you follow. Templates and guides should help you work smart, not only hard.

Practical examples

You can prepare a budgeting template that you use to manage your finances. You can prepare work guidelines or time management guidelines or guidelines for how you will raise your kids in order to agree on the main parenting things with your spouse.

You can prepare household guidelines with clarifications of who does what. A personal not-to-do list is a type of a personal guideline.

Homework

It’s time to start prototyping

There are so many ways how you can prototype; and there are so many tools you can use for it. Specialized apps and online tools, boards, paper only, pen and paper, spreadsheets, text editing software, 3D printing, building models at home from different materials, “go out and see” philosophy, PowerPoint presentations, 3D modeling tools etc. The options are endless; you just have to be a little bit creative.

By knowing all these creative endeavors for living a more diverse and fulfilling life, you simply can’t get bored. There is always something to build, something to test, there are so many different things you can try and do. There are so many different ways how you can play and progress fast at the same time.

You don’t have to be a creative genius. You just have to appreciate life enough, be curious and nurture a desire to live a rich life experience. If you can’t find enough motivation, remember that you are going to die someday. Your time here is limited, so don’t waste your life.

It doesn’t matter if your prototypes aren’t as good as the ones from Apple. But what does matter a lot is how full is the life you’ll live and what your life strategy will be. I suggest you decide for a smart and superior life strategy. The one that works in the 21^st century. So start creating, prototyping and experimenting.

Brainstorm what would be the coolest first prototype you can design and then go into action. Go out and see, be bold and start playing.

This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)

When you hear the word experiment, you probably think of a crazy scientist sitting in his laboratory and mixing some kind of chemical compounds. There also must be an explosion, I guess.

While experiments are most often linked to science, they are very useful in many other disciplines, from arts to business and sports. By following the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, experiments should also become a very important tool in your personal life.

The purpose of performing an experiment in science is very simple. You want to either see if something (an idea) works as planned and desired in a very controlled environment or you want to better understand how the world works, you want to get one step closer to the objective truth.

With experiments you want to gain new knowledge, innovate and better understand the truth.

Here’s the question: aren’t all these things also extremely useful in personal life? They absolutely are. That’s why a scientific approach to life pays big dividends. By conducting a series of experiments in personal life in the search mode, you can enjoy benefits like:

Better understanding yourself and what you want
Better understanding other people and how you can forge better relationships with them
Finding something that is really your fit and you can build massive success on
Discovering your talents and things you are good at
Exploring crazy ideas that can accelerate your massive success
Identifying trends and patterns in your environment
Setting a realistic execution strategy based on superior insights about your environment
Designing the perfect lifestyle you want and deserve
Having fun, trying as many things as possible and living a diverse life experience

Isn’t that cool? And you don’t need a lot. A hypothesis, an idea how to perform an experiment, metrics, and some guts. No, you don’t have to be a crazy scientist. Well, maybe a little bit. By reading this article, you will learn everything you need to know about conducting experiments in your personal life in order to build yourself a superior life strategy.

From the easiest to the toughest experiments in personal life

You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is portrayed as a pyramid with six different types of needs, from the most basic and primitive ones to the cosmopolitan and higher ones. The most basic ones are physiological needs like air, water, food and sex.

Then we have safety needs like personal and financial security. The next ones are needs of love and belonging to family, friends and a spouse. Then self-esteem comes into play, giving a sense of contribution and value. The final ones, on top of the pyramid, are self-actualization needs.

Maslows Hierarchy Of Needs

Why is that important? Well, because on the lower level of the pyramid, you already conducted several experiments in your past, even if you didn’t call them experiments. Here’s what I have in mind:

You probably tried holding your breath for as long as possible underwater.
I assume you haven’t eaten only one type of food in your whole life. You probably tried many different foods and dishes until you found your favorite ones.
I know it depends on where you live and on your religion and family values, but there is a great chance you experimented a little bit in your sex life. At least with a few different positions or partners.

These were all very basic life experiments. You tried something new and then decided whether it works for you or not. Your taste, your emotions and your body were the feedback mechanism. Now, the question is why does experimenting after food and sex becomes less frequent.

Ego investments prevent experimenting

Performing experiments in personal life becomes less frequent because of the risk-reward ratio and because you’re heavily invested in specific behavioral patterns with your beliefs, emotions, money and other resources. I will give you an example of being invested in religious values, because it’s just the most obvious example and since we already talked about food and sex.

If you’re an atheist in the developed world, you can experiment with many different dishes and cuisines, with all the healthy foods known to humankind. If your religious beliefs forbid you from eating certain types of meat, you are emotionally invested in your beliefs and that limits the number of experiments you allow yourself to do. With sex and religion, everything becomes an even more delicate thing.

Now, I’m not encouraging you to start breaking your moral, religious or any other kind of view, I just want to show how you’re invested in something with your ego, beliefs, and values. What’s more important is that everybody inherited thousands of different beliefs from their primary and secondary socialization.

Some of these beliefs work and some of them don’t. Some of them make sense and some of them don’t. Some of them fit your character well, others only bring you frustration and prevent you from finding your perfect fit.

There are many different types of inherited beliefs and learned behavioral patterns that may do you good or on the other hand that may be preventing you from finding a better way to live life. Here are examples of the bad ones:

Beliefs about yourself or the so-called self-labels: I am lazy; I am hardworking; I am not that smart …
Beliefs about money: I will never be rich, money is bad, investing is not for me …
Political beliefs: Everybody is entitled to own a gun, we don’t need a social system …
Beliefs about the opposite gender and other people: All men cheat, people are bad …
All different kinds of beliefs and values, especially the things for which you are 100 % certain you’re right about

There are absolutely good beliefs, values and social norms that must be respected. Not breaking the law, respecting other people, taking care of the community etc. But all of us also have many toxic beliefs in which we are invested, and they prevent you from designing the perfect life you want and deserve and limit all the things you can try and experiment with.

With false investments, we can become our own worst enemies.

Here are a few more examples how limiting and toxic beliefs usually prevent you to experiment:

If you’ve always seen yourself as a lazy person, it may be hard for you to work hard as hell for a month as an experiment. But what if you’d enjoy it? On the other hand, if you always strongly believed that you must work hard and earn money for yourself, you may have a problem enjoying social benefits from the government when you lose a job or asking for help when needed. But what if people are willing to help and you are not on your own?

If you were taught to always go for a safe job, you might not even think about starting your own business, even if you’re a talented entrepreneur. If at home, vegetarians were always seen as weird people, you probably won’t ever experiment with a vegetarian diet. If you believe people are bad in general, how can you experiment with different levels of trust?

Believe in yourself, but doubt your beliefs. Instead try and see.

Get out of the comfort zone

The risk-reward ratio and experimenting

The higher you move on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the worse the risk-reward factor is. At least instinctively and at the first glance. Much like you are invested in your values and beliefs, so you are also emotionally, financially and in many other different ways invested in your current life settings.

If you want to change your life settings, you have to take some risks, you have to move out of the comfort zone. You have to either change and improve yourself, or invest your energy into new things. But rewards aren’t even that certain. You may find a better position or you may not, who knows. What am I talking about?

If you stay in a relationship, you know the short-term risk-reward ratio pretty well, but what if you break the relationship and go find a person who’s a better fit for you? It’s a big risk, and rewards aren’t that certain.
If you stay at your current job, again you know the short-term risk-reward ratio. You have a contract that determines it. But what if you quit the job and start your own business or try to find work that you enjoy more? It’s quite risky and rewards aren’t that certain.
At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization. What does that even mean, at the end of the day, you have bills to pay.

Disinvesting yourself from one thing and investing into a new one is risky. Because there are many unknowns. You need to be bold and brave, having an explorer’s soul to experiment on the higher levels.

You must be really determined to make the most out of your life and find who you are together with what fits you perfectly. Only extremely flexible people have no problem disinvesting their resources from one thing and investing them into another.

But luckily, today the risk-reward factor is greatly improving to your advantage.

Experiments in personal life

You are lucky, today experimenting is easy for the first time in history

Not everything is so dark. There’s some big good news. We live in the best times ever to experiment. At least in most parts of the world. Today you have so many options, so many ways to try new things without any huge risks and without serious investments of your resources.

You only have to be smart about it. In experiments, you can always more or less properly mitigate the risk-reward ratio. It’s not like you are risking your life, like you used to. Today you can always conduct experiments in a very controlled way. You can always take a step back if things don’t go into the right direction.

You just have to learn to manage your ego properly and you have to nurture your curious soul that desires to explore and find itself.

You can easily try dozens of sports to find the one that works best for you. You can easily try several different diets in a very controlled way to find the one that fits you best. You can try many different occupations and jobs in your free time to discover your true talents and what you’re good at.

You can easily try many different investments. You can even practice many different religions to see what gives you the best results (without getting killed). You can experience many different relationships, try many different hobbies, experiment with different cuisines and dishes, you can try several types of arts, you can easily acquire all sorts of knowledge online, there are so many ways to make the world a better place.

You can try dozens of things to find your fits that work best for you. Your fits in different areas of life should become like small mosaics in the canvas on which you design your perfect life. I follow this philosophy all the time. I tried all kinds of different things to find my fits.

I discovered my favorite sports, diet, dishes, people, industries, talents, personality characteristics, intimate preferences, thinking techniques, technology, home settings, how I work, creative endeavors, everything. And it’s awesome, you really live the life that’s meant for you, and you get to live the richest life possible.

Because in the end, you only have two options. Your life can be either a daring adventure or nothing. Your life will definitely be nothing if you don’t have the courage to get off your sofa and explore a little bit. You have to try different things and see what works best for you. Don’t assume, try.

Today, the times are too great to settle for the first job you get, for the first partner you date, for the default behavioral patterns that you inherited, for the foods you always ate at home and for everything else that comes to your life by default. There are exceptions, but in most cases it does pay off to go out and explore. It does pay off to go out and see how varied the world is. It does pay off to experiment. Now the only question left is how to do it.

Subjective assessment

How to do experiments in your personal life

It’s very easy to perform experiments in your personal life. The most important thing is that you write down all the things and insights, and that you do it in a very systematic way. You especially can’t rely only on your memory because you quickly tend to forget things, especially important details.

Here’s what you need:

A notebook: Digital or physical one to write things down.
A purpose or a goal: A short description of what you’re trying to achieve and targeted improvements.
A hypothesis: It’s an educated guess based on your prior experience and knowledge.
Data collection and methodology: A plan for how you will collect data and what kind of experiments you will perform. It’s very frequent that you conduct an experiment several times and that you also have a control group to compare the results with.
Data analysis and conclusion: You perform the experiments, you analyze the data and come to certain conclusions.
Insights: Beside the conclusions, it pays off to write down all kinds of different insights you gained while performing an experiment and all the new ideas you got along the way; especially which new experiments to perform.

The purpose or the goal of experiments in life is quite clear. You want to find a job you enjoy and are good at. You want to find a diet that will enable you to have stable weight and enjoy high levels of energy. You might want to lose weight. You might want to find your dream partner or improve your financial situation. You want to improve your life somehow.

There are many different types of goals you can achieve by experimenting in your personal life. If you aren’t sure where to begin, prepare a prioritized vision list (or you can find ideas at the end of this article). Now let’s look at the next steps after you define the goal you want to achieve.

Breaking down a big goal into small experiments

You want to break down your big goal into a series of small experiments. You should try to break down your overall goal into such small experimental pieces that you isolate your variables as much as possible and that you can really measure the things you want to measure.

The best way to show you how to do this is by example.

If you want to improve your financial situation, you might do the following breakdown: there are two general ways of experimenting for improving the money situation – one is saving more money and the other is earning more money. You can break down these two general ways into several experiments:

“For saving money, I will experiment with automatic transfer of 10 % of my money to a savings account, spreadsheet budgeting and waiting for a week before doing any big purchases in order to manage impulse buying. I will try each of these ideas for a month. And for earning more money, I will try to start an online business in my free time or get an additional job.”

Health assessment

Getting educated

When you’re breaking down your big goals, writing ideas for different experiments and setting your hypotheses, there is one more important step to make. You have to get educated. You have to get madly educated. Whatever you want to improve in your life, the first step is always to get educated really well.

You need to do research, read a few books, write down everything you know about yourself and others, and then decide what you expect, what you think will happen. Since you aren’t doing real scientific experiments, your subjective evaluation will play a vital role in the process. Nevertheless, you should try to design your experiment as objectively as possible. But first always get educated.

Writing down hypotheses and defining the experiments

Now you educated yourself. You’ve broken down your big goal into a set of small goals, small experiments that you can perform with variables that are as isolated as possible. While getting educated and breaking down your goals, you also have to write down the hypotheses for every experiment and define the general terms of how you will perform the experiment.

Practical examples

Here’s an actual example from my personal life (simplified in order to not make this article too long):

Hypothesis 1: I prefer individual sports over team sports. To prove the hypothesis, I will try three individual (fitness, hiking, golf) and three team sports (basketball, volleyball, hockey). I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport, and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. Validated – I like individual sports more.

Hypothesis 2: The individual sports that would suit me best are fitness, running, boxing, crossfit, golf, karate, swimming and hiking. I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. The individual sports that I like and that meet my other goals best are fitness, hiking, swimming. These three were validated, other rejected for various reasons.

Hypothesis 3: Since I’m in bad shape, I will be too tired if I start training three times per week. I’ll train three times a week for two weeks and measure my energy levels. Rejected – I can work out three times per week without a problem. My energy levels are even higher. I will try training four times per week after 1 month.

Hypothesis 4: I will make better progress with a personal trainer in the gym. I will buy a package to work with a professional trainer for a month and compare my performance results to one month of training by myself. Validated – Personal trainers show me how to do exercises correctly and boost my motivation. My progress is also 10 % faster. After two months, I will see how well I work alone, following a new program prepared by a personal trainer.

Hypothesis 5: My motivation is better if I have a buddy to work out with. For 5 times, I will try to work out alone in the gym, and for 5 times with a training partner and compare my results. I will measure my motivation levels, the quality of the workout and other factors. Rejected – Scheduling, talking and drinks after the workout aren’t really helping me.

I suggest that after writing down a hypothesis, you go into details of how you will measure results, what kind of data you will collect, what are the terms for a hypothesis to be validated or rejected, how you will perform the experiment, and so on. It’s extremely fun to play with designing experiments and then actually doing them.

Comparing two options test

Data collection and analysis

There are several ways you can gather and analyze the data and measure results when conducting experiments in your personal life. Here are a few examples of different types of metrics:

Actionable metrics – metrics that help you make decisions and improve yourself
Vanity metrics – metrics that only stroke your ego and don’t help you at all
Qualitative metrics – insights you gather
Quantitate metrics – information that can be measured with numbers
Exploratory metrics – speculations about what could happen
Reporting metrics – comparing actual results to a plan
Leading metrics – predicting the future
Lagging metrics – describing the past

I call all qualitative, exploratory and leading metrics soft metrics, because they give you just a general sense of where you were, where you are and where you’re going. On the other hand, quantitative, reporting and lagging metrics are hardcore metrics, because they show you the truth if measured correctly.

As you will find soon, the quantitative metrics are the coldest ones, because they always show the truth. But you have to avoid vanity metrics at all costs.

Here are examples of metrics for different areas of life you can use:

Health	Money
Exercise frequency Potential progress of illness Managing your body weak points Regular blood test Body composition (% of fat, muscle size) Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max) Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test) Muscular strength (one-rep max) Flexibility (yoga poses)	Personal income statement Earned income Passive income Portfolio income Expenses Taxes Monthly plus/minus Net-worth Assets Doodads Liabilities (Debt)
Career	Relationships
Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart) Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings) Social media influence (Klout score) Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10) Professional connections Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)	Number of close friends you have Time spent with the people you love How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.) How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance) How often you say I love you How often you give a compliment to your partner How often you make love
Competences	Mind/Emotions
Number of books you read Number of seminars you visit Domain knowledge you possess Number of skills you master Number of tech skills Number of creative ideas you have Your IQ Your EQ	How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time) Your daily Happiness index Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting) Dominating cognitive distortions
Number of new things you tried in life Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc. Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)

How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

Your current metrics on different life areas
Your past metrics on different life areas (past month, year etc.)
Don’t compare yourself to others too much (only healthy competition is okay I guess)

There are many ways how you can gather data. You can make your scores on individually prepared tables like the happiness index. You can use many different apps and devices for biofeedback. You can measure and note data in a spreadsheet and then analyze it. You can perform interviews or even do online surveys and tests.

Here are a few ideas for gathering data and conducting experiments (with examples):

Try and do rating (rate how much you like a certain sport or a diet or people’s characteristics)
Conduct an interview or organize a focus group (how it’s like to work at a certain occupation)
Do an online survey (how to name your book, what kind of a service people would buy from you)
Role-playing (to understand how somebody else is feeling)
Diary analysis (analyze your diary to see with whom you feel the best)
A/B tests (writing down all the pros and cons of two computers you want to buy)
Cognitive walkthrough (imagine yourself with completely new life settings)
Competitive testing (analyze how well you are qualified for a certain job compared to the competition and where you need to improve)
Idea crowding (gather ideas for how you can improve from people you know and trust)
Historical data (analyze your weight for the past three months to see where you’re going)

There are so many ways how you can experiment in life. You just have to be a little bit creative. The more experiments you do, the more ideas you get for testing new things. As always, the first time is the hardest, but then a whole new world opens to you.

Homework

Template

Help yourself with the template and do your first experiments in personal life

To make things much easier for you, I prepared a template for you, as always. I suggest you choose one of the experiments listed below, open the template and design your first experiments. Get educated, break your big goal down into small experiments, write down hypotheses and how you will perform the experiments, and then just start playing.

I promise it will be fun.

Here you can download the template:

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Experiments in personal life – Template (xls)

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The best ideas for your first experiment:

Finding one exercise you dislike the least and that you can perform three times per week
Finding two extremely healthy foods you can add to your diet and eat every day
Finding one extremely healthy dish you can cook all by yourself
Finding one way to earn more money
Finding five ways to save more money every month
Finding one topic that interests you to the point where you can read one book per month on the topic
Finding one way how you can improve the relationship with your spouse
Gathering and ranking all the ideas for improving yourself
Gathering and ranking 50 ideas for how you can help the company you work for grow faster
Finding one way how you can play and relax more in life
Finding one way how you can improve your productivity

Good luck with experimenting. Just please don’t turn into a crazy scientist.

Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever
In the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, you don’t just do things because you always did them in a specific way. You don’t just work and execute tasks like a robot.

Instead, you regularly reflect on why you do certain things, analyze how efficiently you are doing them and, most importantly, you constantly evaluate where your actions are leading you and if you are following your True North.

If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding:
- yourself and your actions,
- your environment and its paradigms,
- and the main patterns of your key relationships.
With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.

But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and wise.

There are several points in your life when performing a reflection is extremely valuable:
1. After every sprint (bi-weekly planning session) and 100-day plan (quarterly plan)
2. After every experiment you perform in the search mode as part of validated learning
3. When big or unexpected changes happen in your environment or relationships
4. When negative emotions pile up or you sense big negative mood swings
5. At the end of the day, just before you go to sleep to examine your daily life
Reflections after sprints, 100-day plans and experiments are called introspections in the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework.

Reflections before you go to sleep or when an emotional or situational trigger fires a need for analysis we call short self-reflection. We will discuss both types of reflections in this article.

But first, let’s answer the basic questions of why, how and when to do reflections.

A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit

Regular daily reflections are a positive habit, like any other healthy and beneficial habit, from exercising to reading and being grateful. Every habit has three key elements.

There must be a trigger, a behavior you perform and, in the end, a reward you enjoy. If the triggers are strong enough and rewards are big, you have a greater chance of sticking to a habit. That’s what you also need if you want to stick to regular reflections – strong triggers and big rewards.

Reward – why do short daily reflections

There are so many big rewards of regular reflections. Everybody doubts it, but then after doing it a few times, they become in love with it. Many times, I had to push people a little bit to do it the first time, but then after performing it a whole new world opens to them.

They are like “wow, I didn’t know my mind works like that and that I can get so many insights by writing a few of my thoughts down. With reflections, you can finally meet the deep and rich internal world you possess. And now the benefits.
- You better understand yourself and your actions,
- You pay more attention to your thoughts and emotions
- You become aware of your rich inner world
- You become connected to yourself much better
- You can more easily see all the ways of how you can properly adjust
- You can plan how to do things in a better way
With all that, you gain more control over yourself and you become much more proactive.

With regular reflections, you explore your needs and wants and become very much aware of them. You explore the fears that are blocking you on your way towards your goal. You can finally understand what kind of conflicts are preventing you from being more assertive in life.

You can more easily identify all the different toxic thoughts and how they’re hurting you. You can identify competing commitments, internal frustrations and other things that are blocking you in life. Therefore, combining reflections with mindset upgrades is the perfect combination.

All this removes different inner blocks and releases emotional tensions. Not to mention that these are all the inputs for a superior life strategy.

Regular reflections help you better understand your environment and its paradigms, including people’s diverse behaviors and changes in their behaviors. You can see and understand your position in your environment exceptionally well and you can analyze how different actions can lead you towards different outcomes.

Regular reflections enable you to go from reactive behavior to proactive behavior. Regular reflections enable you to go from being miserable to being happy.

Behavior – how to do short daily reflections

Doing a short daily reflection is an extremely easy exercise. All you have to do is take a notebook and a pen and start writing down your thoughts. You provoke yourself with a few tough questions, you encourage yourself to look at things from different angles and you ask yourself why dozens of times. Then you dig deep. As deeply as possible.

Here are examples of questions you ask yourself during reflection:
- How am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so anxious, angry etc.?
- What does this situation remind me of? When did I feel the same way as I do now?
- What am I trying to achieve with my behavior?
- Why are others behaving towards me as they do?
- What is the best way to improve my situation? Why am I blocking myself?
- What am I scared of? Why am I persisting at this thing that doesn’t work?
- Why does this bother me so much? Why do I really dislike that person?
- What will happen if I do the complete opposite? How would my life look like if I believed the opposite from what I believe now?
- After every question you ask yourself why, why, why and dig deep.
The solemn end of every reflection should always be new insights about you, about your position in the world and how your life relates to different relationships, marketing trends and other environmental elements. After you do a reflection, you should finally understand. There should be many “aha” moments.

When you do retrospections (after execution), you consciously decide how you will change your behavior and actions. You discipline yourself to follow a new behavioral pattern. On the other hand, in very well performed self-reflections it should all come naturally to you without any force. You should feel it in your bones how you can do things differently and how it makes sense to change.

Trigger – when to do short daily reflections

There are many potential triggers that can lead you to do a reflection. Some of them can be planned (after a sprint, before sleep) and some of them can be spontaneous. I suggest you combine both types.

The strongest and most useful triggers are usually emotional ones. Examples include interesting thoughts or ideas you become aware of, big negative changes in your moods, getting hurt by other people, and so on. In such situations, you go straight to the most painful things a lot more easily.

The second most common triggers are time- and location-based. You do a daily reflection before you go to sleep. You do a reflection as part of a planning meeting with your team, and so on. You should always have a few strong location and time triggers that naturally lead you towards performing a reflection.

Introspections – reflections after executions

Now let’s go a little bit deeper into the concept of introspections.

Introspections are reflections you do after different periods of execution and after performing life experiments. They are an integral part of bi-weekly sprints and quarterly planning sessions, and their main purpose is to improve your strategy, tactics and actions.

With retrospections, you want to make sure you’re progressing towards your goal in the best possible way. With regular retrospections, you want to have the smartest strategy and be one step ahead of your instincts, life itself and other people.

Introspections are otherwise also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where a team reflects on how they work and where they can improve. As I mentioned, introspection is done after every sprint. The things you want to achieve with introspections (you can do it by yourself or with your team if you have one) after sprints and 100-day plans are:
- Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
- Carefully planning your next sprint
- Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster
- Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goalswith fewer resources
- Making sure you are going into the right direction (following your True North)
- Brainstorming how you can do things better and how you can improve and adjust
- Analyzing all the new ideas you have
- Better connecting with yourself or with team members if you have a team
- Updating your life vision or vision of the team
- Measuring your real progress based on the metrics framework you set for yourself
- Adjusting the strategy and plan and reflecting on new things that you learned
Sprint planning and short morning meeting with yourself (and/or your team) are great starting points for execution, and reflection is the perfect activity to end every execution interval.

The best practice is to combine planning a new execution phase with reflection on the previous one. That way you can really improve yourself on the way from one sprint to another. The simple rule is to never even leave out execution retrospection when planning your next sprint, quarterly plan or an experiment in the search mode. Never. Because that’s what successful people do.

The bottom lines of introspection are the most important part of the process. If you don’t have the bottom lines, you have a very poorly performed introspection. The mandatory thing is that after every introspection, you have answers to a few very basic, but extremely hard questions:
- What went well during the last sprint that I/we will continue doing?
- What could I/we do differently?
- How can I/we implement the change?
Based on that, you should make three decisions and stick to them:
- What should I start doing?
- What should I stop doing?
- What should I continue doing?
After every introspection, you have to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently. You have to improve and grow. If you don’t, introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

Before we go to short daily reflections, let me once again emphasize the important difference between introspections and self-reflections. The changes and improvements after introspection can be a little bit pushed, you can discipline yourself to do things differently.

Meanwhile changes after self-reflection must come completely from within, they must feel completely natural. You can train yourself to perform a new behavior, but you become wiser after an epiphany that changes how you see the world in every one of your cells.

Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it

Now let’s move from introspections to short daily reflections.

Explained very simply, performing self-reflection means that you take from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions, emotional knots and everything else that’s happening in your life.

The best way is to do it daily by writing a journal. Once you try it, you will see what kind of amazing breakthroughs self-reflection can lead you to. It’s better than any thriller movie once you discover your rich inner world.

There are two perfect moments for doing a short daily reflection. One is at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you can analyze and compare your plans to what actually happened in reality.

You can write down what you’ve learned, people’s unexpected reactions and interesting changes in your relationships, how productive you were and how well you completed the three most important tasks that you had given to yourself for that day, and so on.

The second trigger is when you sense an interesting thought, observation or insight or when negative emotions pile up. When you get extremely moody, when something upsets you, when things don’t go as planned, sit down and start analyzing.

Use the D.E.A.R. concept in those cases. Drop Everything And Reflect. Or sometimes Drop Everything And Read, you know, to get wiser and more educated.

A short daily reflection is slightly different from introspection. If you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you hadn’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

There are no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you want through analytical thinking.

Here are a few additional ideas for what you want to achieve with short daily reflections:

Analyze your day

Think about how your day went compared to – (1) your daily plan and (2) your ideal day. Analyze if you executed all the planned tasks, especially the three most important tasks for the day. Analyze what went wrong and what went right, what you’ve learned throughout the day, and write down the insights you gained.

You can also write down all the cool things that happened to you, so you never forget them. In the end, you can also add all the new things you’re grateful for.

Look for errors in your subjective reality map

You see the world through your subjective lenses. I call it the subjective reality map or the frame. You operate based on this mental frame, a set of schemas defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors. Subjective lenses are like unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

This frame or the subjective reality map is not the truth, even if it most often feels like it. But it’s not the objective reality, it’s only how you interpret the reality with your limiting senses.

That’s important, because there are many errors in your subjective reality map. From wrong assumptions and cognitive biases to all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. With reflections, you should identify as many errors in your subjective reality map as possible.

Through analysis, you should notice that you were wrong about something (but first you have to put your ego aside) and then say to yourself: “Oh gosh, I was really wrong about that” or “I can’t believe I was lying to myself so hard” or “I really operated based on toxic behavioral patterns and beliefs, now I see it”.

With regular reflections, you should come closer to the objective truth and identify all the ways you’re lying to yourself or deceiving yourself.

Make subconscious conscious

By asking yourself tough questions and digging deep, you can find many emotional knots in yourself of which you weren’t aware before. These knots are tied by all the mistakes your parents made in your upbringing. The more toxic the family environment where you were raised was, the more tension there is. Not all family environments are toxic, but many of them are.

When you identify these emotional knots, they lose some of their power and some tension gets released. On top of that, you can become aware of why you are performing some self-sabotaging behaviors.

With regular reflections, I identified all kinds of different things, like why I was always late, why I was afraid to start my own business, why knowledge is so important to me, and much more.

Brainstorm ideas

The only way to keep your creative muscle strong is to regularly brainstorm ideas. If you do it every day, the creative part of your brain will be fit and strong.

It’s hard to brainstorm ideas every day, but you can still make it a part of your shutdown routine before you go to sleep, just after making a short reflection. In such a case you will never forget to train and stretch your creative muscles.

An idea that isn’t written down is an idea quickly forgotten.

Of course you won’t have only brilliant ideas with regular brainstorming, but writing down as many ideas as possible is the only way to get to brilliant ideas. If you write down 100 ideas every day, most of them will be absolutely crappy; but every now and then, a new brilliant idea will be born among all the crap. An idea that might lead you to a new course of life.

An idea to start a business, to help your company to grow, how to improve your relationships or how to experience life more fully, and so on. One such powerful idea can change your life forever.

Giving instructions to your subconscious

Your brain works 24/7. No rest, no holidays, just work. Even when you sleep and enjoy your dreams, that’s your brain at work. One good way to use your brain better is to keep the dreaming function alive during the day as well. It helps you be more creative, stay curious and an optimist.

Very similarly, but the other way around, it also makes sense to give instructions to your brain what to work on when you are asleep. There are many different types of instructions you can give to your brain. Revealing a part of your subconscious self to you in your dreams, finding a new solution for various problems, experiencing lucid dreaming, and so on.

As the last step of your daily reflection, just after your brainstorming session and before you go to sleep, give instructions to your brain what to work on while you’re sleeping. Just say to yourself (or to your brain) what you want your cognitive power to be used for during sleep. It will absolutely raise your productivity levels and lead you to many cool new insights.

Homework

Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook

Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, always carries a simple inexpensive notebook and a pen with him. He writes down all cool ideas, meeting minutes, observations, and so on. You can do the same just for personal purposes.

A simple notebook that you always carry with you is the best way to do regular introspections and self-reflections. Because when an interesting thought appears, you can simply sit down and start writing. Whenever and wherever you are.

You can do it digitally, of course, but there is a special connection between paper, pen, your hand and your brain. So I suggest you go to a stationery shop and buy yourself a notebook you like, a pen that feels comfortable to write with, and start with regular daily reflections.

The mantra here is to just do it. As mentioned several times, it’s hard the first few times. I have people in my life I care deeply about and it took me years to convince them to try self-reflections. It took me three years to convince somebody I love to do their first self-reflection. Three years.

The first few times, you always feel blocked somehow. There’s nothing to write down. It feels weird. But you have to be patient with yourself.

Sooner or later your heart opens and your thoughts start to flow.

After performing one really deep self-reflection I guarantee you that it will become one of your favorite parts of the day and one of your favorite personal development tools; especially because you will forge a better connection with yourself and you will be able to easily enter your rich inner world that’s hidden deeply inside you. Have courage and start exploring your inner self.

You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric

There is no way to avoid conflict in everyday life. Sonner or later, you encounter some kind of incompatibility between you and another subject or force. Conflicts always brings tension and drama, but they aren’t necessarily bad.

Actually, conflicts are mandatory for new, better and more creative ideas to arise. The main prerequisite for conflicts to be productive is to keep them under control.

We know several main types of conflicts:

Man against self
Man against man
Man against society
Man against nature
Man against god/faith
Man against supernatural
Man against markets
Man against robots (with the rise of AI)

There are many different ways to keep conflict under control and prevent its escalation. Show respect to all other parties involved. Don’t criticize ideas, use them as an input to be even more creative. Don’t focus on blame, instead focus on finding the best solution.

You don’t have to be always right and you should never put your ego in front of learning or trying something new. If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification and follow other guidelines of good communication. Use humor, stay kind but express your opinion, and so on.

Nevertheless, by far the best advice that doesn’t only keep tension under control, but also leads to the fastest progress possible, is putting data before rhetoric.

Data before rhetoric

Superior rhetoric skills must present zero advantage

Scientific research has shown over and over again that very heterogeneous interdisciplinary teams perform by far the best in non-routine challenges. I strongly believe that this fact applies to business teams as well as to teams in personal life, for example family or a specific group of friends.

For a group of people to function, there absolutely have to be common interests, visions and goals, but the greater the diversity of members, the crazier are the ideas, solutions and suggestions that have the chance to arise.

Nevertheless, diversity brings tension. Some people handle verbal tension better than others. Even more, some people have great advantages when discussions get heated. Because some people are verbally more assertive than others, and a few people are shy introverts (like I am) who get scared to the bones in big arguments.

Usually every group of people includes one or two individuals who are very assertive communicators and have an ability to strongly fight for why their arguments make the most sense; even if they might not. They verbally overpower other team members and that kills the collective brainpower. It’s a disaster.

In any team that wants to perform well, superior rhetoric mustn’t be any advantage. Team culture must allow a shy introvert to speak as much and as passionately as the verbally strongest extrovert. Google did a big research on the best performing teams, and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else.

All arguments are equal until they are put to the test.

There were two indicators of psychological safety: firstly, team members spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking (introverts, extroverts, shy people and the strongest rhetoric).

Secondly, all the good teams had high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.

Agreeing to always put data before rhetoric is a great way to set the basic rules of teamwork, indicating that all arguments are equal until they’re put to the test. Every idea counts, and all the main ideas should get tested.

There is no need for tension to escalate when you put data before rhetoric

Humans get creative ideas. Humans have inspirations. Humans have opinions. Data and metrics do the validation. Instincts are experiments and data is proof.

Zero always invites imagination and when you are at zero, there is a huge space for egos, opinions and arguments to fight based on assumptions. But wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why every assumption and prediction needs to be tested. With one exception.

Instincts are experiments and data is proof.

The only way you can predict things with high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately you can forecast short-term future.

And there is no way to predict long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 3 years. But short-term history is in many cases a good basis for predicting short-term future.

Practical examples

If you haven’t exercised for the past three months or even years, there is a high probability that you won’t exercise tomorrow. A partner who cheated on all of their exes is very likely to cheat on their next partner.

But when you’re trying new things, experimenting and brainstorming new ideas, you rarely have accurate historical data you could rely on. Thus all the ideas, arguments and convictions are nothing but untested assumptions – hypotheses. Nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. That’s why assumptions need to be tested.

Here’s an example. There is a lot of conflicting advice regarding diet online. Do calories matter or does only the type of food you eat matter? Does eating meat make you more tired or not? Should you eat before sleep to gain muscle or is it the number one way to gain fat? Should you eat five small meals or two large ones?

For every argument, you can find scientific studies, testimonials of fitness professionals, people claiming that this one piece of advice changed their life etc. At the same time you can find scientific studies and testimonials for the opposite advice to work perfectly. You can find dozens of studies why tomato is healthy and why it’s not.

So what is the best solution, to listen to the loudest message out there or to put things to the test and see what works for you as an individual?

When you decide to put everything to the test, there is no need for an argument. You can have a heated discussion to brainstorm the best ideas and inspirations, but then you just have to do experiments to find the thing that enables you the fastest progress towards your vision and goals.

There is never one single way to the goal and there is no single success recipe that would work for all people.

Instead of wasting energy in a pissing contest, direct the team’s energy into the following:

Gather all the ideas and make sure they’re as diverse and crazy as possible
Rank the ideas in the order they’ll be tested in (set a system that makes sense depending on your goals. Have a voting system or any other kind of system, don’t allow that one person with the strongest ego to tell you how things should be ranked.)
Define metrics that will measure real progress
Define with what kind of experiments you will get the data
Perform the experiments, gather the data and see what works better
Re-rank ideas and do additional experiments
Never stop experimenting, doubt and test everything

Today, technology can do a lot of measuring for you. You have so many different devices, apps and tools to measure feedback.

To determine how you are progressing, you can employ different life metrics, biofeedback metrics, you can do split tests, online experiments or even use subjective things like scales from 1 to 10 or the happiness index. You don’t need anything really complicated to measure your progress, you aren’t trying to win a Nobel prize, you’re just trying to make better decisions based on better data. Machine validate

Other benefits of putting data before rhetoric

There are many other benefits of putting data before rhetoric. Not only do arguments based on opinions get reduced, you also:

Don’t get lost in a fake feeling of progress,
can only manage things that you measure,
get the answers to what really works and gives you the fastest progress, and
in the end, metrics should drive your behavior.

Metrics are what should be leading you to decide what you will start doing in life, what you will stop doing and what behavioral patterns you will continue to perform. Metrics are the ones that should tell you if you persevere at something or pivot to something else.

The painful fact is that you are forced to face reality when you put data before rhetoric, but living in a lie or in an illusion brings only short-term comfort and much bigger long-term pain. The sooner you admit to yourself where you are, the faster you can start to progress and improve.

Only metrics can show you the hard reality and only metrics can take you from dreaming and being at zero to measuring your real progress, performing and achieving massive success.

Testament to put data before rhetoric

You can’t just put data before rhetoric. People’s egos are just too strong. Even if you’re performing an experiment on your own and there are no other people involved, your ego will always block you and give you headaches. So you must consciously agree on some very basic rules.

The first rule you must become okay with is that it’s not about being right, it’s about finding the fastest way to validated learning and progress. You shouldn’t have any problem being wrong. You should expect that you’re wrong.

And then you shouldn’t have a problem accepting a different view, angle or action that works better than yours. Because you’re always wrong before you’re right. Steve Jobs had no problem being wrong, and you shouldn’t have a problem with it either.

The next rule is that almost all ideas should be put to the test. Especially the crazy ones. I know it’s a matter of resources and you can’t test truly everything, but the point is to never ditch ideas that sound crazy or for which the majority thinks they won’t work.

I did dozens of online A/B tests (ads, landing pages etc.), where I was completely sure that A will work better than B, but then the reality was a lot different. You never know what will work better.

Thirdly, you need to gather real valid data and then make decisions based on this data. You have to perform experiments scientifically, at least to some extent (that’s not as horrible as it sounds). You need to write down hypotheses, you need metrics and you need to conduct experiments.

When you get the results, the data must help you make a decision about what to do. If a metric only strokes your ego, it’s probably not a good metric. If metrics show you one thing and you do something else, you aren’t data-driven.

After performing an experiment, you need an answer to the question: what will I do differently based on this information?

Practical applications and examples

Before we look at a few examples, I have to emphasize a few more important facts regarding metrics. If you want for your metrics to make any sense, they need to be comparable and understandable.

Usually, they are a ratio or rate and are connected to the core part of your goal. Metrics set in the right way illustrate cause and effect, and lead you to what to do next. Nevertheless, they aren’t a magical solution; they just point you to the step to take next.

The big downside to putting data before rhetoric is that it takes a lot of additional effort, time and creativity to perform the experiments and gather the metrics. But s/he who progresses the fastest, succeeds the fastest. The effort pays off sooner or later. Putting data before rhetoric is part of a superior life strategy, it’s why some people are successful and others are not.

Now let’s look at a few examples for where and how you can put things to the test, instead of arguing what works and what doesn’t with other people.

Argument	Counterargument	Let’s find out
Learning to code is easy and everybody should do it.	Learning to code is extremely hard.	Dedicate 100 hours of intensive learning to coding and do an online test (solve challenges) to see how good of a programmer you’ve become.
Coffee is the best anti-oxidant with many health benefits.	Coffee makes you anxious, you can’t sleep at night and it’s bad for your stomach.	Drink a cup of coffee for one month in the morning and observe what’s happening to your body, sleep, productivity etc. You can measure how long you can work in a day, you have devices that measure the quality of your sleep …
If you eat before sleep, you will get fatter.	It doesn’t matter when you eat as long as you’re in a caloric deficit.	Eat before sleep for 4 weeks and don’t for 4 weeks, keep the same calorie levels and see what happens to your fat percentage.
Meditation will make you a calmer person.	It’s impossible to meditate in today’s busy life and you only get nervous sitting in the same place for 20 minutes.	Try to meditate for a month and mark from 1 to 10 how difficult it is to follow and how calm you are before and after.
You can’t make money out of a hobby.	There is always a way to make money out of a hobby.	List all your hobbies, for every hobby write down several business ideas, pick the best one and try to make some money in your free time. Measure how much money you make. You can even test more ideas.
Life without a mobile phone in the afternoon is much more peaceful and calm.	It’s impossible to live without a mobile phone in today’s society.	Turn off your mobile phone after you get home from your job for two weeks and measure your calmness level.
Too much attention in a relationship is not good. There always has to be a bit of distance.	You should regularly invest a certain level of attention into a relationship to develop it to the deeper levels.	Spend an additional hour with your partner without any distractions and technology, talk, touch, make love, tell each other jokes or whatever you like, and every day, mark on a scale how good your relationship is.

These are all simplified examples to illustrate the way to apply theory to practice. When you write down the hypotheses, you also need to define very well how the experiment will be performed and what kind of results will lead to what kind of conclusions.

When you’re defining metrics, note that there are metrics that are hard-core data (like body fat percentage) and there are data that are very subjective (like the happiness index). Here you can find more than 40 life metrics as additional ideas for experiments. Just make sure you aren’t using vanity metrics.

All others bring data - Deming quote

Homework

Do your first data-driven decision

Think of an argument you currently have in a team, with your friends, with your spouse or with any other person that’s part of your key relationships. Instead of continuing with the ego battles and opinions, decide for a different approach, the “data before rhetoric” approach. It will be fun.

Propose to the parties involved that you do a scientific experiment to find out which different arguments that people are having can be validated and which can’t. Think of metrics and what could be the experiment.

The moment you start talking about metrics and experiments, you will disinvest your ego, stay flexible in your thinking more easily, and more agile in angles of how you see life. On top of that, conducting an experiment will be super fun, as I mentioned.

Do experiments, gather and analyze the data, and see where it points. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about what works. In the last step, decide with all the parties involved how you will change your behavior, team culture or with what actions you will proceed.

After conducting the first few experiments, you will soon see every one of your beliefs, convictions, assumptions and ego opinions as nothing but hypotheses that need to be put to the test.

If you’re interested, here are my slides on the topic of metrics and putting data before rhetoric in startups. Maybe you’ll get some additional ideas for how to use these principles in your personal life.

Innovation accounting and key metrics for startups from Blaz Kos

Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups

One day, I was hiking in the mountains with my girlfriend. On the way back, we got a little bit lost and I decided to put my survival skills to work. It didn’t take long for me to find the trail. I assumed that this was the trail we followed to get up to the summit. I was sure of it. I remembered. I saw the same trees. Of course the trail wasn’t the right one and we got even more lost. It took us hours to get back on the right track.

Almost a decade ago, I spent a few months in California. I saw that every elite university has an alumni club and graduates are its proud members. When I returned home, I decided to found an alumni club of my high school, since it was an elite one. I strongly assumed that the school will see the benefits, people will love it and everybody will be happy. The school blocked it, people ignored it and it became one of my failed projects.

A few years back, I decided to get fit. I never did any sports, and healthy living was something alien to me. On top of that I was super fat. It made complete logical sense to me that to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you only have to go to the gym a few times and mind your food a little bit. Maybe you eat a cup of protein powder from time to time. Now more than three years have passed and I still don’t look anywhere near like Schwarzenegger.

In all three stories, I was operating based on wrong assumptions. I was 100 % sure that I knew what I was doing, but I was wrong. Meeting reality wasn’t easy. And you have to meet it sooner or later in one way or another.

Life works in a way that in many cases, you have no other choice but to rely on your assumptions. But it helps a lot if you know that they are nothing but assumptions that need to be tested as quickly as possible. Because wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

Don’t doubt yourself, but absolutely doubt everything you assume.

Subjective objective reality

Two realities

We know two types of reality – the objective and subjective one. The objective reality isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. We try to come as close to it as possible, especially with science.

Nevertheless, complete objective reality will probably still be inaccessible for a long period of time, because there are always things for which we don’t know that we don’t know them. Artificial intelligence may be the first one to come as close to objective reality as possible.

Here is an example of how complicated it may be to get to the bottom of objective truth:

People used to believe that you got ill because you became possessed by evil spirits.
Then doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors.
Now we “know” that viruses and bacteria cause a big portion of diseases, but the question is if maybe there even exists something else that we don’t know yet and that causes real illness? In hundred years, will a pill be seen as a primitive solution, like a herbal potion mixture is seen today?
And many times, the placebo effect can help you get better, so it’s not only about drugs.

The second type of reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world. It’s the lens through which you see the world, the frame in which you operate.

The lenses of how you interpret the world are created by your beliefs, values, past experiences, upbringing, environment and other similar factors, including your assumptions. These lenses are the primary source of how you make your decisions in life.

As we’ve learnt, there are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, there are many things you don’t know or lack experience, everyone has many cognitive distortions and there are numerous other sources of errors in the subjective reality map.

One big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are cognitive biases. It’s something you can’t avoid, but you can become aware that they’re part of your thinking. From stereotyping, conformation bias and anchoring to projection, transference and the halo effect. The list of cognitive biases is very long.

Ironically, many of the cognitive biases exist to support your survival. They serve to help you protect your self-image, to deal with optimization, to help you make complex decisions, judge probabilities and avoid danger.

They may often provide you with psychological safety and protection, but they also often help you hide behind lies or drive you to make stupid decisions.

The other big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are wrong assumptions. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You assume you know something, but you don’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than you expected.

That’s because the objective world is always different from your subjective representations and unique interpretations. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

Wrong assumptions

The world of wrong assumptions

You make assumptions all the time, you can’t avoid this phenomenon. It’s the way we humans operate, it’s how our brains function. Therefore, it’s impossible not to make any assumptions. The problem arises when you believe that your assumptions are the truth. But they are not, they’re only assumptions.

It’s impossible not to make assumptions, but you can become aware that they are only assumptions, not the truth.

There are so many different types of assumptions you make. Let’s look at just a few of them.

Practical examples

You assume you communicated something clearly, but maybe you haven’t. You assume other people know what you want or that they have the same values as you. But they probably don’t. You make different assumptions about what might work and what might not. In reality, you never know.

You make assumptions about what other people think and what will they probably do. You even make assumptions about what other people think of you. You make assumptions about which ideas will work and which ones won’t, how it would be like to live in another country and so on, you make assumptions practically about everything.

The key question is: if you can’t avoid making assumptions, what can you do about it? First of all, as we said, don’t mistake assumptions for the truth.

Be aware that you are making nothing but assumptions. Then put assumptions to the test as soon as possible. Do a series of actions and experiments that will get you closer to the objective truth.

Put your assumptions to the test

The best cure for those errors in your subjective map of reality that you make because you assume things is to put assumptions to the test. You conduct a series of small actions and experiments that slowly lead you to a better understanding of the objective reality.

You will never completely reach the objective truth, but you don’t have to. All you need is a superior understanding and key insights on which you can set your actions.

There are many ways how you can do that. Before we dive into different approaches to testing assumptions, or hypotheses to sound more scientific, you must make sure that you become aware of the assumptions you’re making. You do that in two simple steps:

You say to yourself: I am only making an assumption, I don’t know the truth.
Then you ask yourself: how can I validate or reject my assumptions, how can I put them to the test?

After becoming aware of the assumptions you’re making, there are several ways how you can test them. Here are a few most common approaches:

Ask questions and get educated
Get out and gain experience
Search before you execute
Actionable metrics
Random experiences
Research techniques

Ask questions and get educated

The first thing you can do to put certain types of assumptions to the test is to ask questions. Don’t be shy, just ask.

You assume s/he doesn’t feel the way you feel? Ask. You assume a person doesn’t like you? Ask if that’s true and why. You don’t understand something? Ask. When you’re in a dilemma and you can ask a person to give a clarification, do it, don’t hesitate.

A quick important note, when you ask people about clarifications make sure you also observe their behavior, not only listen to what they have to say. What people do is often more important than what they say. Because everyone lives in their own subjective reality, where we don’t even know the truth about ourselves.

The second thing you can do is to get educated. Read books on the topic. Talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Subscribe to an online course. Model other people.

Knowledge is not as valuable as real-life experience, but it absolutely makes sense to get very well-educated first and then you immediately apply knowledge to practice.

There are always “aha” moments when you start educating yourself. You say to yourself many times, oh I didn’t know that is so, I imagined it (assumed) a lot differently. Ask questions, get educated, doubt every statement; but believe in yourself.

Go out and gain first-hand experience

First-hand experience acquired by small carefully set experiments is definitely a very good way to test the majority of assumptions. There is no better teacher than reality.

Meeting reality can be harsh, but it really enables you to understand the world and yourself better. That’s why you have to do small manageable experiments. In other words, you have to be constantly in the learning, not the panic zone.

There is a saying that you make good decisions based on experience and you gain experience based on bad decisions. That saying exposes very well how gaining real-life experience works. You’re always wrong before you’re right. You take a small step, you fail, you learn, you stand up again and then you continue in a new direction; you go from failure to failure until you succeed.

You assume you have a good business idea? Build a landing page and send some traffic to it. It costs you a weekend of work and a few hundred dollars. You assume you don’t like to travel? Try it. You assume you’re a bad lecturer? Give it a shot. Today, you can luckily test almost everything, quickly and inexpensively.

Experiments in life

The search mode

The search mode is nothing but a systematical series of experiments for finding your perfect fit in a specific area of life. You consciously decide that you will search for a thing that works for you and you don’t stop until you find it.

In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world.

The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best.

This phase is only about learning, nothing else. No goals. Just learning and playing. After every experiment you conduct, you decide whether to persevere or pivot.

If you want to be in the search mode, you have to meet the following criteria:

You consciously decide that you will enter the search mode
You write down what kind of experiments you will make
You set “search mode” metrics and define very well how you will measure your progress
Every experiment needs to be validated or rejected based on the set metrics
You write down what you’ve learnt after every experiment
You make a decision whether you will pivot or preserve
Everything needs to be written down, otherwise you can quickly forget what you’ve learnt

Use actionable metrics

Science conducts a carefully orchestrated set of experiments to better understand how the world works. In order for the experiments to be as accurate as possible, there are many different rules to follow – deduction, induction, hypotheses, variables, control groups etc.

In most cases, some kind of metrics are involved – you have to measure to either validate or reject your assumptions.

That’s why metrics go hand in hand with experiments. Metrics, at the end of the day, are the best indicator of how accurate your assumptions are. Thus you have to base most of your agency and learning on life metrics.

You have to measure when you’re right and when you’re wrong. You have to measure when you’re progressing and when you’re lying to yourself with the fake feeling of progress.

There are many ways how you can measure things. From your physical responses and emotions, to the feedback you get from your environment and the monetary value you create.

So first become aware when you’re making assumptions, then brainstorm what would be the most appropriate experiment to put assumptions to the test and in the end, have a set of metrics that will guide you into the right direction.

Examples of actionable metrics in a personal life:

Health	Money
Exercise frequency Potential progress of illness Managing your body weak points Regular blood test Body composition (% of fat, muscle size) Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max) Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test) Muscular strength (one-rep max) Flexibility (yoga poses)	Personal income statement Earned income Passive income Portfolio income Expenses Taxes Monthly plus/minus Net-worth Assets Doodads Liabilities (Debt)
Career	Relationships
Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart) Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings) Social media influence (Klout score) Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10) Professional connections Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)	Number of close friends you have Time spent with the people you love How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.) How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance) How often you say I love you How often you give a compliment to your partner How often you make love
Competences	Mind/Emotions
Number of books you read Number of seminars you visit Domain knowledge you possess Number of skills you master Number of tech skills Number of creative ideas you have Your IQ Your EQ	How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time) Your daily Happiness index Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting) Dominating cognitive distortions
Number of new things you tried in life Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc. Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)

How you should measure your success in life? Compare…

Your current metrics on different life areas
Your past metrics on different life areas (past month, year etc.)
Don’t compare yourself to others too much (only healthy competition is okay I guess)

Random experiences

From time to time, it makes sense to go for a random experience, especially for things where you assume you’ve found the fit that work best for you. Because sometimes a completely new experience opens a whole new world to you, a world you didn’t know even existed.

What you think you like and what you actually like are two different things. That’s why it always makes sense to go for a rich life experience and try new things when you get the opportunity to do so.

An example would be considering your favorite dish. You’ve tried many different foods in the past and now you know that you like pasta Bolognese the most. Then you travel to a completely new place and they have your favorite dish on the menu and a dish you’ve never eaten before, but it’s their bestseller.

In the same way, I encourage you to try different sports, investments, get to know different cultures, life settings, read things you never read before, try new hobbies, and so on. Sometimes do it strategically by employing the search mode, other times do it when the opportunity pops up, and sometimes just go proactively for a random experience.

You will never know until you try and you will never know if you always stick to the same things.

Research techniques

For some of your assumptions, especially in business, you may need a professional scientific approach to testing assumptions and employing different research techniques like interviews, surveys, split testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry, mental models, different types of analysis and many other similar research techniques.

Scientists use these techniques in their daily work to better understand the world, and there is no reason why you wouldn’t use them in your personal life while keeping the same goal in mind.

You can use these techniques to test your (business) ideas, assess different investment opportunities, when you analyze your environment and its paradigms, when you study people’s behavior and in many other cases. Keep your mind open and use different tools at your disposal when an assumption needs to be tested.

Tech changes

Life changes and so testing assumptions never ends

No matter how experienced you get, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing. And it’s changing faster and faster.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

That’s why you constantly need to keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your life strategy and actions.

That’s why the search mode is so important. That’s why regular reflections are mandatory. That’s why you have to adjust your course of action and how you will get to your goal on a bi-weekly basis, if not even more frequently. That’s how you stay lean and agile.

Don’t just assume. Experiment and validate. Only then take action.

How long you should practice when you’re learning something new
The number one advice when you’re learning a new subject or a new skill is to master the basics. The best approach to effective learning is to divide and conquer. You divide the subject into small building blocks and then you make sure you’re really mastering each and every building block. One by one.

By mastering the basics, you set strong foundations, on which you can build complete mastery of a whole new competence.

If you don’t master the basics first and then move on to more advanced topics, you always have to keep coming back to the basics when you get lost. You can easily trip if your core is weak and if you’re making unsure steps.

Even though practice makes perfect, there is always a big dilemma present when you’re learning something new. You don’t want to practice the basics or even any more advanced block of knowledge too little, but on the other hand, you also don’t want to practice it too much.

You have limited time and you don’t want to waste it on something that you’ve already mastered. Thus an important question comes up – how much to practice when you are learning something new, and when to stop it and move on.

We can get a very good answer to that question in, who would have thought, advanced coding principles.

Test-driven development gives us the answer

Test-driven development (TDD) is a special approach in the software development process, where you first code a test based on software requirements and only after that write the shortest possible code that will make the test pass.

First, you write a test to see whether the code is doing what it’s supposed to do, but you know that the test will fail, because there is really no code written yet.

Then in the second step, you write the simplest possible code that will make the test pass. It’s a similar concept to the lean startup, where you visit your potential customers even before you have a finished product.

Writing a unit test ensures that a developer understands the software’s feature and specification really well. This kind of an approach also ensures that the developer isn’t adding unnecessary code to the project. Last but not least, the code is better written in small units that can be easily managed.

There are many interesting principles that follow test-driven development, absolutely worth mentioning:
- Get something working now and perfect it later
- Keep the test units small and manageable
- KISS: Keep it simple, stupid
- YAGNI: You aren’t going to need it
- Fake it until you make it
- Refactor: Regularly clean the code and avoid duplication
There are many lessons we can take from TDD and implement it in personal lives, similar to those from agile development, since they go hand in hand.
First think about what exactly do you want to do – have a use case

Put everything to the test first

Expect to fail first

Do small tests and constantly adjust

Don’t waste your resources

Do immediate implementation
That’s all good, but let’s go back to the original question. In more complex programming cases, an important question comes up – how many tests to write, how to know that you’ve done enough?

There are, of course, many tools you can use that measure the accordance of unit tests with code (it’s called code coverage). But there is also a rule of thumb of how many tests a programmer should write, and this rule of thumb also gives us the answer to how long you should practice a new block of knowledge.

How long should you practice?

In test-driven development, there is a rule of thumb to “test until fear turns to boredom”. You can use the same exact principle when you’re learning a new block of knowledge – practice until fear turns to boredom.

Practice a new skill or block of knowledge until fear turns to boredom.

Let’s parse this statement a little bit. When you’re new to something, the probability of making mistakes is great. There is always some kind of fear present that you will do something wrong or fail.

There may be a few examples that you don’t understand very well yet, there may be a tricky way of asking you a question regarding the topic that may quickly confuse you, or part of the knowledge may still be completely alien to you. We can all put that under “fear”.

But after you practice enough, soon there is nothing new to understand and master in that specific block of knowledge. A challenge slowly starts changing into boredom.

When there isn’t a single drop of fear anymore that you might make a mistake, and when every exercise and revision turns into boredom, you can be sure that you’re mastering the knowledge. Then it’s time to move to the next block.

No fear and boredom, these are the signals that you’re a master at something.

This is what super learners do

In the fast food society, we want everything quickly. Learning is no exception in this. People in general don’t want to learn at all after they finish school, but when they do, they want to learn everything fast and easy.

Learning anything worthwhile takes time, effort, energy and a systematic approach.

If you’re serious about acquiring any new knowledge or skill, do it the right way. Slice and dice the subject so you don’t get overwhelmed. Break the subject into small pieces you can master in a respectable amount of time.

Learn the theory and then immediately apply it in practice. Practice each and every block of knowledge until it becomes a part of you, until you can do it in seconds. Practice until fear turns into boredom.

If you master building block by building block, you will soon progress from the beginner to the intermediate level and then all the way to the advanced and master level.

But remember, it takes years to become master at anything. Like Sisyphus, you have to move block by block, repeat the boring stuff again and again, and only then can you shine as an improved version of yourself with a completely new competence. But once you acquire it, nobody can take it away from you.

Use this principle in any area of life

You can use the “building block” principle together with “until fear turns into boredom” in any area of life. No matter what you’d like to learn, this approach works. If you make the building block small enough, it will motivate you to move on. Basic and easy building blocks are early wins that keep you going.

Building blocks start to accumulate and soon you get to the domino effect when things start to make sense. You’re enjoying it more and more. With mastery, passion also slowly develops. Then you want to master even more complex blocks of knowledge.

Practical examples

Want to learn more about a healthy diet? Slice and dice. Shape building blocks like macro-nutrition, micro-nutrition, calorie calculation, food combining, healthy shopping list, food supplements etc. Master them one by one.

Read a few books and a few hundred articles regarding every building block. While you’re mastering every block by itself, you of course also test different things and see what works best for you.

Want to learn how to invest? Again slice and dice. Microeconomics, macroeconomics. Basic investing principles. Different types of investments and different types of investment approaches.

Risk, reward, liquidity, costs and other factors. Trading platforms etc. Master one by one. Make your first small investment. Talk to other investors. Step by step, while keeping a long-term perspective.

Want to learn how to build a successful business? It’s a complex subject, so slice and dice. First learn to brainstorm business ideas and do a simple analysis. Then how to test ideas with customer discovery and other lean approaches.

Then we have team building, fundraising, marketing and sales, and the basics of finance and accounting. First you have to learn how to sell the product, then how to build it and how to form a successful team around it, then other supporting functions.

Want to learn how to code? Again slice and dice. You educate yourself about different programming languages and what they’re used for and dive into one of them. Then you learn the basic fundamentals of coding – syntax, data types, conditions, iterations, collections, debugging etc.

Then you get to know different frameworks and basic coding principles and approaches like OOP, TDD and MVC. And then … well, I don’t know, here’s where I currently am.

You won’t feel overwhelmed with such an approach. You can shape building blocks that fit into your schedule. You can simply timebox learning periods in your calendar. You will train your attention span. You will train your brain. And most importantly, you will acquire a new skill you want to master.

Homework

Pick one subject or skill you want to master, outline the first building block and get going. Revise the building block until fear turns into boredom. Then move to the next one.

validated learning

Rapid prototyping for designing a superior life strategy

Prototyping and rapid prototyping

Get educated and then start experimenting as quickly as possible

Examples of rapid prototyping in personal life

Genchi Genbutsu

Pen and paper

Mockups and models

Wizard of Oz test

Storyboards and use cases

Video prototyping and simulations

Role-playing

Mind-mapping

Scenarios and flow charts

Templates and guidelines

It’s time to start prototyping

This is how to do experiments in your personal life (outside the bedroom)

From the easiest to the toughest experiments in personal life

Ego investments prevent experimenting

The risk-reward ratio and experimenting

You are lucky, today experimenting is easy for the first time in history

How to do experiments in your personal life

Breaking down a big goal into small experiments

Getting educated

Writing down hypotheses and defining the experiments

Data collection and analysis

Help yourself with the template and do your first experiments in personal life

Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever

A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit

Reward – why do short daily reflections

Behavior – how to do short daily reflections

Trigger – when to do short daily reflections

Introspections – reflections after executions

Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it

Analyze your day

Look for errors in your subjective reality map

Make subconscious conscious

Brainstorm ideas

Giving instructions to your subconscious

Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook

You know nothing, so always put data before rhetoric

Superior rhetoric skills must present zero advantage

There is no need for tension to escalate when you put data before rhetoric

Other benefits of putting data before rhetoric

Testament to put data before rhetoric

Practical applications and examples

Do your first data-driven decision

Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups

Two realities

The world of wrong assumptions

Put your assumptions to the test

Ask questions and get educated

Go out and gain first-hand experience

The search mode

Use actionable metrics

Random experiences

Research techniques

Life changes and so testing assumptions never ends

How long you should practice when you’re learning something new

Test-driven development gives us the answer

How long should you practice?

This is what super learners do

Use this principle in any area of life