You're All Grown Up, But Never Stop Experimenting

We need to experiment more. We need more trial and error. I started thinking “Well so what are you doing Tim? Are you experimenting with your own life?” And I thought back to one of the times when I’d been happiest – when I was a college student. I think the reason so many people enjoy being college students is think about it, you’re experimenting. You’re experimenting with everything.

You’ve got new friends, a new place, new ideas. Maybe you’re experimenting with some things you shouldn’t be experimenting with, but you’re doing all this experimentation and it’s in a safe space. Nothing can really go wrong. And at the end of three years you’ll sit for your exams and you’ll graduate and off you’ll go and get a job. It’s just a wonderful time of life despite the fact that you’ll fail and you’ll screw up. You’ll embarrass yourself. You’ll have those moments that make you cringe. It’s actually tremendously fulfilling.

I then think about what happened to me the year after college. I stopped experimenting. I put on a suit. I put on a tie. I got a job in management consulting and I tried to figure out exactly how that job was done and I stopped experimenting. My world shrank. I became very conservative and afraid of failure and I think it was probably the worst year of my life.

I think a lot of people have had that experience and we spend much of our adult lives thinking back and harking back to a time when we felt freer to experiment. So I’m not saying you should start smoking dope and get a really terrible haircut and all the things you used to do as a student. But maybe you should recapture some of that willingness to fail a little, to try a few new things and yeah, sometimes it will be embarrassing. But maybe that is not such a bad thing. Maybe it’s worth it.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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