Year Long Experiments Are All The Rage: What Are Yours?

Let’s continue to get real with ourselves.

It is a good idea to look past the normal time-usage illusions many people have.

What are those? Things like:

• It can wait. I’ll do it tomorrow (in the future).

• This will only take 5 minutes.

• I must have a large block of time in order to do X.

• I’ll put it into a “to-do” list for maybe someday.

• There’s plenty of time. I have all day, week, month, summer to do this.

• If I can just get organized, then I’ll have time to do X, Y, and Z.

Things like that.

Well, here’s the real thing.

If you did the five-year time chunks exercise I suggested this month (see “Chunks of Time, Slices of Life”), you likely discovered that in a five-year period, you really don’t have that many peak experiences that are memorable and long-lasting.

Likely, there are only a few of those five-year periods that had a lot of “big and significant” events associated with them.

I might be wrong, but only you know yourself.

For me, it was easy to pick five for each period, but harder if I had tried to stretch it to ten.

I am sure you were able to come up with five peak experiences for each five-year chunk of time, too,

but I bet you even had to dig into your memory bank for some of those blocks.

Am I right?

Here’s the deal.

We’re only capable of so much.

But we tend to think we have all the time in the world to get around to doing the things that we really want to do.

I think this might be why the idea of “big experiments” has caught on.

Maybe they’ve always been around, but it seems like a lot of people write “the book” they always wanted to write based on one of their big experiments.

Sure, there was Thoreau and his 2+ year experiment in simple living.

He’s probably the source of inspiration for this current trend.

But seems now it is in the form of, “I spent one year doing X, and here’s what I learned.”

Recently, I read Brave or Stupid.

That was the story of two guys from Sweden who sailed all around the world.

One of them was 45 or so, and the other was 53 or so.

That was from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2005.

But they spent 1997 until they left getting ready and learning to sail.

Eight years of devotion for one big, hairy, audacious goal, as Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, might call it.

Holy Slipstream!!

They could have completed medical school to become doctors in that time, right?

And unfortunately, one of them, the older man, is dead now.

Best I can tell, he was around 73 to 74 years old.

Do you think he regrets going on that journey?

He did, at times, while on it, I am sure.

He was the most seasick of the two sailors.

He almost lost a limb due to insect bites getting infected.

But I doubt he regretted it any time after it was over.

And he seemed to love the overall experience, even with the hardships while on the journey.

It was a life-defining moment.

Another book that came to my attention recently is called New Slow City.

It is about a couple who moved from their 2,000-square-foot townhouse in Queens into a 350-square-foot studio in Manhattan.

That’s a bit like moving into a sailboat, right?

Just one that is stationary at the dock and is in the heart of the most densely populated city in the United States.

Evidently, they got the idea from staying in a small cabin on vacation.

This is all we need. Why do we have so much?

So, they decided to see if they could live the same “leisure” lifestyle in Manhattan.

He scaled back his workdays to two days per week. His wife did not.

Kind of lopsided, and it doesn’t seem fair to me, but to each their own.

And it sounds like they needed the money and maybe the insurance from her job.

Anyway, then he would spend five days per week in leisure.

This is basically like taking the standard five days of work and two weekend days and flipping it on its head.

I like that idea.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime partner at Berkshire, loved to do this.

He called it inverting the problem.

The basic idea was to think of Manhattan as their “living room.”

Why just hang around in your house/apartment when there is so much out in the world to explore?

He basically went to libraries, sought out city “sanctuaries” (peaceful, beautiful, tucked-away places), sauntered through the city observing people, places, and things, and did creative writing for the fun of it.

It lasted a year. Then he wrote and published a book about it.

Savvy dude.

I highly doubt they regret doing that, either. It had to have been a very fun adventure.

They were renting both places, so it made it a little easier to switch and move.

The thing I probably fall into the most is the “maybe someday” delusion.

If I consider that the guy in Brave or Stupid basically lived another 20 years after finishing sailing the world, then I have to ask myself:

“How many one-year experiments do you have left in you, dude?”

He had 20, or less.

Did he use them? I am not sure.

He wrote the Swedish version of the book, so I am sure he did use at least two or three of them for that.

But, yeah, I doubt he thought he would pass away so young.

According to Google Gemini, a 55-year-old in Sweden in 2005 had a life expectancy of about 81–82 years old.

We always think we can beat the house in gambling, right?

This is why I only gamble on stocks.

Alright, that’s it for today.

Now go figure out your top 20 or so one-year experiments.

And then start doing them.

I will do my best to do the same.