We’ve talked before about how we don’t have to see our way all the way to the end result or the end pursuit– instead, we simply have to see our way to Point A.

And THAT is where experimentation comes in.

“Whenever possible, we should get out of the business of prediction altogether,” write Dan and Chip Heath in their 2013 book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and in Work. The authors note that even renowned experts are notoriously wrong when trying to make predictions.

Thus, the downfall of “Internet shopping for careers.”

In essence, we cannot accurately predict whether or not we’ll enjoy a particular pursuit beforehand.

“Think about a student, Steve, who has decided to go to pharmacy school. What makes him think that’s a good option? Well, he spent months toying with other possibilities– medical school and even law school– and he eventually decided pharmacy was the best fit. He’s always enjoyed chemistry, after all, and he likes the idea of working in health care. He feels like the lifestyle of a pharmacist, with its semireasonable hours and good pay, would suit him well.

But this is pretty thin evidence for such an important decision! Steve is contemplating a minimum time commitment of two years for graduate school, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and foregone income. He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an [experiment], and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’d be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job. (Certainly if he can afford several years of school withut an income, he can afford to take a month long unpaid internship.)

Surely this concept– testing a profession before entering it– sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: law students who’ve never spent a day in an office and med students who’ve never spent time in a hospital or clinic.”

– Dan and Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and in Work

Aside from testing our assumptions & predictions without “betting big” and without “Internet shopping with all we’ve got,” experimentation also allows us a starting point from which we can evolve in new and unforeseen directions, discovering new lands (career paths) that we might not have known existed.

“Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?”

– Dan and Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and in Work

This is what experimentation is all about– it’s about testing our way from Point A to Point B in order that we might also test and evolve our way to Point C, D, and beyond.

In this module, I’ll be showing you how to find a starting point for your experimentation and giving you lots of ideas to get you going so you can start moving in the right direction now.

But before we get into action, let’s first return to the homework you completed from Module 3, in which you tracked your aliveness. It is this compass that we’ll be using as a guide and a foundation for our experimentation to come.

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Next: Continue to to Section 4.2: Creating Your Aliveness Compass.