52 Weeks: The Year of Micro Experiments

Join me, won’t you?

I’m embarking on a year of micro experiments, one each week.

These will be experiments in how I approach my creative work, family time, body input (eating), body output (exercise), time usage, shutting down at the end of the day for reals because I most often don’t, as well as some spiritual tinkering along the way.

Let’s talk micro for a minute.

I’m emphasizing the micro. Small changes.

If it’s not easy, if it’s not small and incremental, if it doesn’t slide happily and without fuss into my busy schedule then this likely won’t be the year to try it.

Cuz . . .

I like my life as it is. I just want to improve upon it.

Since the coming of the scale-it-up-to-11 digital startup era much has been made of moonshots: Those impossibly galactic goals so colossal they eclipse the sun if you get the trajectory right. Knocking out competitors and disrupting the status quo of a thousand years too, if you do it really well.

I’m the opposite. I’m more of a pebble shot kind of guy. With a slingshot.

At heart I’m an incrementalist.

Sure, like you, I’ve made quantum bets — choices that ruptured all that came before. Moving to NYC from Florida. Quitting well-paying jobs for adventure. Moving into a van and driving around the country looking for an art town to move to. Diving into the unknown, like starting an art gallery after spending not one minute in the business.

Still, really, I believe most in tweakage. Small iterative tweaks that build. I believe most in incremental change that amps up into momentum.

Because:

Momentum becomes trajectory becomes inevitability.

Having mooned over micro . . . counterintuitively I’ll be kicking off the series with something macro: My DIY Creative Retreat.

I’ll be serving up that post next. About this past week where my friend Travis Thomas — book him now as a speaker or a coach while you can still afford him — and I created a home-based retreat on the fly.

(While we were doing the retreat Travis had this brilliant idea I can’t share, because it’s his idea to share on his timeframe . . . but I will come back and link to it here when he does announce it . . . and his idea spurred this idea, micro experimenting my way through the next year.)

After the DIY Creative Retreat piece I’ll post each weekend about the #TweakOfTheWeek.

You don’t need to tweak something every week, though wouldn’t it be cool if you engaged in a small life experiment for a week at some point? Maybe several . . .

Join me, won’t you?