What If It's All An Experiment?

I spend a lot of time thinking about science fair projects.

I grew up in middle schools, so the aesthetic is familiar to me. Tri-fold project boards, scalloped trims, staying up 'til 2 am cutting dolphins out of a picture book because you left it for last minute, trying to be quiet because Mom had to drive to Walmart at midnight so now she's annoyed and probably exhausted but also you both know it's funny.

As a teen girl who was explicitly uninterested in anything involving the use of numbers, the simplicity of the science fair process was good for me: Problem/Question, Hypothesis, Observations, Results, Conclusions.

Even if you found yourself making up a month's worth of observation logs about a cucumber growing process that never technically happened, the science fair formula was easy enough to work with. Plus, you got to make it pretty, which I am intrinsically good at.

All in all, my relationship to the science fair is probably a perfect example of the Pretty Decent approach: good enough, maybe a little bit bullshit (isn't all art?), gets the job done. Oh, and there's a dolphin.

I believe creative business works like this, too.

There are problems and questions we attempt to answer and solve. How can I make friends when I work from home? Why shouldn't a car drive itself? What if peanut butter and jelly came all squished up together in the tube?

From there, we hypothesize and experiment. As an artist, I know you know how this part feels. You approach the blank page, slap a color down, start throwing things in the pot. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we have a recipe or a blueprint — we can deconstruct how others have done it before us. Copying flows, mirroring styles, studying the greats and whatever else J. Cole said. 

In business, this sometimes looks like testing brand new offers, but it also can be a matter of sharing the same idea in new ways. We don't always have to start from scratch, after all — when we slow down and think about it, we often find we already have evidence that something we're doing has worked.

Either way, along come observations. Mostly, I've noticed, my observations tend to be about how it all feels. Does doing this experiment help me get out of bed in the morning? Am I excited to play? 

There may also be data or results: 10 sales, 2 replies, an unsubscribe, 15% more joy. For the numbers-averse, this may be where we find the most resistance — flinging our hands up in the air, screaming "I just wanted to make stuff!" and crawling into bed for a week. 

It's all process. And really, it still might all feel like bullshit. But that's life, right?

In the end, human beings love to recognize patterns and form good old fashioned conclusions. And hey, sometimes these conclusions are helpful. Other times we wake up in the middle of the night, stumble through the dark, see ourselves in the mirror and realize we had it wrong all along. But we experimented, which at least means we're informed. We now know how it feels to try. 

I don't know what you're working on or what problems you're trying to solve, but if you're reading this I just want you to know that your effort hasn't gone unnoticed. Even if it hasn't gone the way you expected when you started out, you are infinitely closer than you were before, simply because you tried. And that matters. 

At least, it matters to me.