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“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To prove my friend wrong about habits, I sent him a photo of Thai chilies.
Earlier, knowing I’m big on habits, he sent me a meme that’s going around. Discipline, it says, makes each day look the same. A life without it makes each year look the same.
I told him it sounds good, but it’s wrong.
For weeks I hunted for Thai chilies until I found them. Each day, checking a shop was one experiment among others, like a recipe I might wreck or a new ad test. An experiment is anything I try without knowing how it will turn out.
A chef named Ferran Adrià kept the calendar at his restaurant, elBulli, the same each year and made the menu different each season. He served guests for half the year. He spent the other half in a Barcelona workshop inventing the next menu.
Eat there two summers in a row and you’d get two different menus.
The restaurant is a museum now. It’s called elBulli1846, after the 1,846 dishes his team catalogued.
Habits repeat, but one of mine is to run experiments each day.
The meme offers a trade: a better year in exchange for a boring day.
Take it if you want it.
A routine repeats whatever you put in it. Put something new in it and you keep the better year while each day comes out different.
🌶️
How could you make trying new things a daily habit?
