The Art of Trying New Things

“Someday.”

During grad school, I fell in love with trying new things. I saw the power: I was a fat kid who had never run more than 3 miles at a time, and thought “I’m not a person who works out.” Four months of half-marathon training, and now daily exercise is integral to my identity. I used to have social anxiety and now I give seminars on networking. Every time I deliberately sought out new experiences that seemed impossibly outside my comfort zone, they completely changed how I think, act, and value.

In practice, there were sprints and crawls in my self-development during grad school. Often times, I dreamed of trying new things, but my life pretty much stayed the same. Goals went nowhere. I got discouraged, and in darker days I blamed my environment or people around me for holding me back. Any life-changing sprints would always fade back into a soul-sucking crawl.

Clearly, I was falling into a trap when trying new things. Finally, at the end of my PhD, I figured it out. When did I sprint and when did I crawl? The determining factor: whether or not I applied the Ultimate Rule.

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 The Ultimate Rule for successfully trying new things:

When you encounter something new you can try, you only have three choices: 

1)    Do it immediately. 

2)    Schedule it for a specific time in the next 1-3 months. If it is not accomplished by that deadline, do Option 3. 

3)    Discard it and forget about it. 

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Option 3 is hardest. You may think it’s foolish. You may have trouble letting go of the dream of trying it. Or you may simply be used to accumulating ideas you don’t do anything about. All three applied to me. But now I know: Discarding and forgetting goals is the key to accomplishing goals.

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The trap

Let’s consider the basic anatomy of trying new things:

Step 1: Discover that this new thing exists

Step 2: Decide to act

Step 3: Act

Step 4: Learn from action

It’s easy to do Step 1 over and over and over again. For some reason, this step is really addictive. That’s the trap.

The world is filled with new things to try. Just look around you, or at the Internet. Bucket lists. So many books and Internet articles! Juggling! Ukulele! People skills! Lucid dreaming! Rock climbing! Memory techniques! So many countries to travel to! Thousands of hobbies! So many skills that will open so many doors! I put these on a list titled “Someday/Maybe.”

A “someday” list feels like the right thing to do. I thought, “Gotta dream big, right?” After all, it energizes and motivates me. Good thing, right?

Wrong. It’s a drug. It’s a hit of energy and motivation.  It’s getting a reward without doing anything. Your brain gets addicted to reading and dreaming about cool things to do, which is fun and easy. Actually trying new things is scary, and your brain will rationalize putting it off with “I don’t have time right now” or a similar excuse. After all, you already got your hit. If “someday” is an option, then “someday” will become the default choice.  

What’s worse, you’ve gathered all this information about new things to try. It’s floating around in your brain, it’s bloating your to-do list, and now you have half-started hobbies strewn around your home. You constantly see all this clutter, and every time you see it, you are forced to say, “I’ll do it someday later.” The “someday” mentality is self-reinforcing, and now you’re trapped by your habits and your environment.

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Discarding goals is key to accomplishing goals

So Step 1 is the problem (discovering new things). How do you consistently get to Steps 2 and 3 (deciding to act, and then taking action)? You must make it a habit to implement the Ultimate Rule. Again, you either try the new thing immediately or schedule it for a specific time. If you fail to do this, you MUST drop it and forget about it.

Get a clean slate as quickly as possible. You have a lot of goals floating around in your head, and reminders of goals strewn around your home. These will clutter your mind. If you have a lot of things on your bucket list built up, delete them all now. If you have a guitar you haven’t played in years, get rid of it. If you have 20 unread books on your shelf, donate them now. All at once.

Then, face reality. “Someday” is a myth.

You will never “find time.” You have to make time for personal growth. If you want to run a marathon, is it worth clearing space in your schedule to train? You WILL need to say no to your buddies going to the bar, you WILL need to sacrifice sleep to get other work done, you WILL need to sacrifice other hobbies.

Trying worthwhile new things, by definition, should take you outside your comfort zone. You WILL have to fail many times, because that is how you learn. If you want to learn a language, you WILL need to commit to speaking no English for set periods of time. And you WILL embarrass yourself stumbling over words. This is emotionally draining, and you MUST be willing to fail and deal with frustration.

Apply the Ultimate Rule and decide once and for all whether to take action, by doing something new immediately or scheduling it. What is this really worth to you, and is it worth re-organizing your life for it?

If the answer is no, forget it. Discard it. Simply don’t think about it. You don’t want the thought of “someday” to paralyze you.

If the answer is yes, then this very act of deciding between taking action and discarding has forced you to clarify the value of the activity. If the answer is yes, then you will see this new venture through to the end, no matter what. You will make time and energy for it. Force yourself to act, the only thing that will ever make a difference. Nothing will stop you from becoming what you want to become.