After all, it's just an experiment!

People are going to peg me as a Peter Bregman groupie.  Oh well, there are worse things, I suppose.

Bregman wrote another post last month that has stuck with me ever since, called Live Life as an Experiment.  In it, he tells a story of an experiment in which he returned an item to a store and tried to get out of paying the 20% restocking fee.  His experiment succeeded; he appealed to the store manager’s generosity and avoided paying the fee, and learned that many people really do want to be generous, given the chance.  But he drew a much bigger lesson from this, which appeals to me a great deal.  And that was,

Live life as an experiment!

“Because when we live life as an experiment, we are far more willing to take risks, to acknowledge failure, to learn and develop. That's what experiments are all about: discovery and growth. There is no real failure in an experiment because it's all data. If something doesn't work, that's simply data that leads to changing behavior to see if something else does work.”

Bregman's argument suggests to me that I might be willing to do something I would normally find embarrassing, if it’s an experiment.  Take, for example, business cold calling!  Something I’m horrified at the thought of doing, for a number of reasons which are probably pretty sound.  But what if I made an experiment of it?  What if the point was to see whether a cold call resulted in a meeting, or in a hang-up?  If the goal of the experiment is simply data, then either result is OK, right?

What other business related icky projects could I turn into an experiment?  How would this mindset improve my willingness to take a risk?  What could I learn from it?

Who knows, it might even result in increased business!  Now, wouldn’t that be grand?

25 Things

This is admittedly a rather odd, random post for this blog, but it was inspired by a wonderful, fairly recent post by one of my favorite bloggers-writers-inspiring people, Barbara Winter, called Things I Haven't Told You, and perhaps it was a bit of an odd random post for her as well.  But I had fun coming up with it!  So I'm going to go ahead and "pooblish" it (as Havi would say)!  Here goes, 25 random things even friends and family may not know (or remember) about me, in pretty much the order they popped into my head:

1. I once cooked a complete Indian (as in the country, predominately N. Indian, if memory serves) meal for a chef of a well known Seattle restaurant.  Quite scary!
2. Game of darts anyone?  As a kid, I was the unfortunate recipient of a dart to the face, a result of standing in the wrong spot at the wrong moment.  No lasting scars, happy to say.
3. I do not own a DVR or Tivo and have no plans to buy them – in fact, I plan to discontinue Cable altogether in the near future - just have never wanted to give TV quite that much importance.
4. I hate sit-coms and reality shows with equal vigor.
5. When I was a mere youth of 23 (or 24), I managed around 20 people for a month or two in a massive database and mailing project.
6. I have lived in the greater LA area on two separate occasions in my life, approximately 20 years apart.
7. I have been interested in wine tasting and (modest) collecting for almost 25 years.
8. I used to be very unhappy about being sent to bed just when the Flinstones was coming on TV (this was prime time, not re-runs my friends - boy am I dating myself).
9. When I was very little, my parents nicknamed me DeeDee in hopes of avoid the Daffy-Duck teasing.  It didn’t work, and the DeeDee nickname never stuck.  And, I eventually developed some affection for those references and bore the nicknames of Daphe, Duck and Duckling rather happily.  (DON'T call me that now, unless you are my brother.)
10. I have never enjoyed going to bed early or getting up early, and I probably never will.
11. When I was young, Music Man was my favorite movie musical, and I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs.
12. I took ballet lessons until I was about 7 (I had no talent to speak of) and later regretted that I quit.
13. I studied piano for about 15 years.  I didn’t play half badly.  (Now I haven’t played for a very long time, but hope to pick it up again someday.)
14. Apart from babysitting, my very first job was as a helper at a neighborhood pre-school.  Adorable kids, but I’ve hated the smell of Lysol ever since.
15. I’ve never worked as a waitress or in any other capacity in a restaurant, and given my love of cooking, I think it would have been helpful.
16. The above doesn’t include fast food however; I did spend a summer working at a Taco Bell.
17. Once I had a dream about a rather involved sort of team game not unlike hide and seek (the rules of which I’ve long since forgotten), and proceeded to organize 7 friends to play the game one weekend.  I don’t remember much about the game, but I recall we all had a good time.
18. I came to my love of opera via Wagner, which is unusual – most people start with Puccini or Mozart, I think.  (I love those composers too, of course.)
19. I travelled through Europe for 8 weeks with a college girlfriend when I was 22; it was a wonderful and in many ways a formative experience.
20. I loved to read as a child and would become so engrossed in my book that my mother would have to call me multiple times (from 10 feet away) before I heard her.
21. My 3rd grade teacher was the first to complement my writing skills when she assigned a little short story assignment.
22. However, I have always been so intimidated by writing fiction that I dropped out of my college creative writing class – couldn’t handle the stress of it.
23. I camped and hiked my way through the Four Corners area alone for a month when I was 38.  One of the incredible highlights of my life!
24. When I was in college, I wanted to be a student forever.  Philosophy-Lit major – yeah baby, loved it! 
25. I dabbled in at least three graduate areas of study (or four, depending on how I count) and ultimately didn’t complete any of them.  And I’m OK with that.

Got your own list of things most people don't know about you?  Share some in the comments!