Everything is an Experiment
How are you experimenting with your personal brand comfort zone daily? Developing an experimental mindset could be the painless method to discovering your potential.
It’s one thing to understand you’re in your comfort zone. It’s another to find practical ways to push past it daily. Here’s what I’ve discovered is the solution - adopting a mindset that everything is an experiment.
Seeing everything as an experiment creates a sense of ongoing discovery. Of observation. It takes the pressure of perfection. It allows us to test tiny ideas. Over time, tiny daily experiments can lead to huge results for your personal brand.
Tip #1: Practise daily ‘zooming’
I was first introduced to the idea of ‘zooming’ in Seth Godin’s Survival is Not Enough.
In a brilliant analogy to science and nature, Godin proposes that a brand’s ability to survive - or better yet thrive - is about evolving. And to evolve, you must overcome your innate anti-change reflex.
Godin proposes the best way to do this is to ‘zoom’. Which is developing an appreciation of change. This is more than learning to manage change. But rather, creating a passion for continuous, even daily experimentation. Making change tiny and painless.
Personal branding calls for continuous evolution and reinvention. Godin's daily 'zooming' challenges you to push your comfort zone at every opportunity. Venturing into the unknown daily, with a love of quick experimenting.
Over time, your continuous experiments and efforts to evolve will compound. And while so many personal brands stay stagnant, you’ve learned to thrive.
So, what are some of the ways you can get comfortable being uncomfortable? Simply try something different.
Tiny experiments
Remember that experiments can be tiny and painless. But, over time, they prevent you from becoming unintentionally trapped in your comfort zone.
Here are a few tiny ways that could help prevent you from stagnating:
Make a tiny tweak to a usual work task, format or communication.
Meet with someone new.
Challenge yourself to do the same task in slightly less time.
Switch up your schedule to test the optimal time to perform certain tasks.
Send an email you normally wouldn’t.
Read a book in a different genre.
Take a different route to work.
Walk in a different direction.
Switch the station or try a different podcast.
Work in a different location.
Post on social media (or try a different style or time).
Test the waters on a project or strategic idea.
Go out when you’d rather stay in.
Voluntary deprivation
Every year, I give up something I usually enjoy for those 12 months. This has included alcohol, my favourite treats and streaming subscriptions. I came to recognise these personal challenges in the phrase ‘voluntary deprivation’.
This is intentionally practised by some. Giving up something that’s normally a part of your life for a set period. The aim is to challenge yourself to adapt to changes, and test your limits. Building your reservoir for when unexpected challenges arise.
If you want to try this for yourself, I trust you’ll only give up non-essential low-risk things. Things that don’t impact your mental or physical wellbeing. Whether it’s a week, month, year or whatever period suits you, consider if this resonates with you.
Tip #2: Create the space for reflection and measurement
All good experiments need questions, hypothesises, observations and analyses. No one is expecting a written report every time you push your daily comfort zone. But, how are you creating the space for reflection in your personal brand experimenting?
It could be as simple as journalling or walking - which has been a discipline of some of our world’s greatest thought-leaders, including Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.
If your experiments have more tangible quantitive data, take the time to review and record your results.
Tip #3: Out-fail the competition
In Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett shares the importance failure has had on his skyrocketing success. More than the common rhetoric about embracing failure as it comes, this is about seeking it out:
“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
All failure becomes feedback.
Bookings.com has gone as far as appointing a ‘Director of Experimentation’:
“We believe that controlled experimentation is the most successful approach to building products that customers want."
John C. Maxell presents the idea of ‘failing forward’ in his book of the same title. The premise is that success comes by learning from failings.
As the book reflects, it’s the spirit of failing forward that made the Wright Brothers a household name. Unlike their counterpart, Dr Samuel P Langley, they were unknown, uneducated and unfunded. Yet, just days after Langley gave in to defeat, the bolder brothers famously flew over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
We tend to overestimate the event and underestimate the process. I would argue that, if you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re likely playing it safe. And staying in your comfort zone.
The idea of ‘failing fast’ is often most embraced in Silicon Valley. It’s the idea of failing often and failing early. By failing, you develop insight into what doesn’t work. Insight that can be often missed while you’re on a winning streak. Testing and iterating so you can eventually succeed.
The final extracts of Michael E. Gerber's best-seller, The E-Myth Revisited, says it best:
“Keep the curtain up…
The curtain is your Comfort Zone…
Your Comfort Zone has been the curtain you have placed in front of your face and through which you view the world…
Your Comfort Zone has been the tight little cozy planet on which you have lived, knowing all the places to hide because it’s so small…
Comfort overtakes us all when we’re least prepared for it.”
So, adopt a mindset that everything, no matter how small, is an experiment and watch your personal brand discover how to thrive.
