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Hello and Happy Monday to you! I’ve been doing advent calendar countdowns since I was a little kid. I remember opening little doors on a paper advent calendar when I was really young. Today with my own family we do a countdown, but we’ve modified it a little bit. We’ve got a string of stockings, and each stocking has a note inside. The note has an activity that we’ll do as a family that day. It’s things like making a treat, watching a holiday movie, reading a book, or whatever we can think of. This year I added in a brand new activity, which was making homemade wreaths. I watched Youtube videos on how to do it, then bought supplies. Over the weekend we went out as a family into our property, armed with various tools and buckets, and gathered material. The base was Texas Cedar boughs, but we found some other colored branches, and then some purple and red berry-type things. It was a fun new activity to explore!
In the digital world I made changes to my research process that I’m liking. I did the “post-processing” of five more books (where I take notes after reading through a book, summarizing things in my own words, and drawing connections to other works). It allowed me to tweak my process in a way I’m really happy with. In parallel I started reading Robert Green’s “48 Laws of Power,” which will take me a while to get through (864 pages). I’ll be able to go through more of my book processing backlog since I won’t finish anything new for a while! I used ChatGPT as a thought partner for cooking this week. I had ground beef and felt stuck with a handful of normal recipes, so I asked the “Sous Chef” GPT for help. We ended up navigating to a Tamale Pie sorta thing. I had to make some tweaks and change ratios, but it came out reasonably well for a first try! Actually, these things are probably why today’s deep dive topic is on my mind! They’re examples that can illustrate the exploit versus explore concept. I can stick with what I know (last year’s advent activities, my old research process, and my normal recipes), or I can branch out into the unknown. I’m itching to dive deeper, so I’ll stop here. See you in a few minutes down below 😆 Kevin A Quote Three Things1 – 👁️ Relax Your Eye to Relax Your Body – I was already well aware that breathing impacts the nervous system. Long exhales relax the body. What I did not know until listening to a two year old Tim Ferriss podcast with Andrew Huberman was that the eye has a similar impact. When you narrow your focus – say, on a computer screen, or other fine task – it increases your heart rate and triggers the sympathetic nervous system. You can invert that by relaxing the eye to take in the periphery, like looking out at a distant vista. It lowers the heart rate and triggers the parasympathetic nervous system. Ahhhh… 🧘 2 – 🏊 GoRuck Misogi in Costa Rica – I first heard the term ‘misogi’ in Michael Easter’s, “The Comfort Crisis”. The name comes from a Japanese myth documented in text circa 711 AD. In the story a character visits the underworld and has to cleanse himself. In modern times here in the West it refers to doing something extremely difficult at least once per year. You purify your spirit by pushing yourself to your limits – but one of the rules is that it can’t be so difficult that you die. GoRuck is facilitating a misogi retreat in January that looks cool. I can’t drop everything and go next month, but I’ll keep an eye on it for later. It also gives me a goal to shoot for: Rucking 12 miles in 3h30m (17.5 min/mile pace for 12 hours). 3 – ⚓️ Battleship Game (link to old ’60s ads) – My daughter and I tend to be the early risers in the house. On the weekends, typically Sunday, she and I will spend some time playing 2-person board games together before anyone else is awake. I’ll drink coffee, and we just play, chat, and connect. It’s been a fun ritual for me to slow down and be present with her. Do you have any two-person board game suggestions for us? Deeper DiveToday I want to dive into the tension between explore and exploit. Exploring is the idea of going out into the unknown. It’s gathering new information. It’s trying new things. Exploiting is staying put. It’s leveraging what you know. It’s sticking with the things you’re familiar with. The tension between these two poles is in the background of your life all the time! Do you follow your same morning routine or switch it up? Do you try that new brand, or stay with what works? Every decision you make is committing to one path of many: Will you explore or exploit? Everything you have in your life came from exploration. At one point you’d never heard/seen/felt/tasted the thing you now love, but it’s in your life today because you were willing to try something new. For example, think of your favorite song. Do you remember how that came into your life? Maybe a friend sent it to you. Or maybe a Spotify playlist introduced it. Either way, there was a distinct milestone in your life where you chose to explore the unknown and were rewarded for it. So if everything you love is the result of exploration, does that mean you should constantly explore? No. That’s survivorship bias coming into play. Just because everything you love comes from exploration, not every exploration will result in something you love. So should you stop exploring and stick with what you know? No. That’s living a smaller life than is necessary, and can make you more fragile. There’s no perfect answer and we get to play in the gray area! 🌫️ Let’s look at three factors that can give us insight into balancing this tension, and then explore some examples before concluding with a call to action. The three factors I’ll discuss next are:
Risk and Uncertainty Spotify said I listened to 8,312 songs in 2023. Only 50 of them were added to my favorites list. That means on average I listen to roughly 167 songs to find just one that I love enough to press the little plus button in Spotify. Not a great hit rate! On the higher end, 48 of the 100 books I’ve read so far this year I’ve rated at or above a 4 on a 5-point scale. Nearly half the books I read I really like! Granted, I’m doing research ahead of time and not choosing at random, but that’s a strategy anyone can use for reducing risk. All things in life exist on a distribution; some things suck, some things are magical, and a lot are in between. Each time you choose to explore instead of exploit, you’re taking a risk – there’s a chance the new thing is better than what you know, and a chance that it’s worse. You’ll have to think through the risks – and reduce them as you can – but know that with risk comes reward. Opportunity Cost You can’t explore and exploit simultaneously. Saying yes to one thing is saying no to all others in that moment. You can only go out to eat at one restaurant tonight. You can only pick up one book at a time. The opportunity to try something costs you the opportunity to try others. When I said yes to turning ground beef into tamale pie last week, I was saying no to hamburgers. So when deciding whether to explore or exploit, you’ll need to think; what am I saying yes to, and what does that mean I’m saying no to? Time Horizon One of the most actionable factors to be aware of is your time horizon. It’s one of the clearer and more measurable factors, and it has a large bearing on your decision. What it means is that you should think of how much time you have in front of your decision when deciding to explore or exploit. When you’ve got a lot of time left for something, you should explore. When your time horizon is short, you should exploit. For a lot of things you’ll have your entire life in front of you! If I listen to over 8,000 songs per year and live until I’m 100, I’ll have half a million songs left. A decision to listen to one over the other is no big deal because I’ve got 499,999 more opportunities to follow. Some things have a short time horizon. If I’m about to move, I should eat at my favorite restaurant versus choosing something at random. If I’m about to retire, I shouldn’t YOLO my life savings into Bitcoin.
Now that we’ve got the factors of uncertainty, opportunity cost, and time horizon fresh in our mind, let’s dive into a handful of concrete examples to see how the explore versus exploit tension comes up. Career – When you’re early in your career it makes sense to explore all sorts of career options. You don’t know what you’ll love and you’ve got limited experience. You should network and expose yourself to all sorts of ideas. Conversely, if you’re on track to retire with a pension in two years, it’s probably not wise to attempt a new role in a new industry. You can’t afford the risk that you won’t be as successful in the new role. Strategy to hit a Business Goal – Let’s say that you’ve got a full year to hit a large business goal. In the beginning you should explore all sorts of options to see what has traction. You should seek out the novel and divergent thinking and test them fast. You should be willing to risk the uncertainty of the unknown on the chance you’ll hit a big lever. Conversely, as you get closer to the end of year, you’ll want to focus your energy behind known bets versus starting down a new and unknown research path; most won’t have time to bear fruit. Movie Production – Movie studios have to think through this tension, and as of late the “exploit” camp is winning. Movie studios have learned that sequels are where the money is, so they’ve been increasingly reliant on sequels each year (see below data, through 2010 – source). Theoretically each new IP could be the next big thing, but given the cost of a modern movie, their risk profile has changed to bias them towards exploitation than exploration.
Armed with these principles and examples, how can we take action in our lives? The first step is being conscious. Areas where we’re in exploit mode tend to be the ones in the background and we don’t think about them. You’re no longer exploring and your brain has moved processing into the background. Try to notice what’s automatic for you, or what feels like a default. Do you repeatedly make the same choice anywhere? On the small scale, maybe you always get the same type of coffee. Maybe you always sign off your emails in the same way. Think about doing some exploring. Try a coffee drink closely related to the one you already like, or get your same drink, but from a different shop. If you like to close your emails with a “Thanks,” throw in some alternatives. Maybe a new emoji, too! You don’t have to go wild, just push the boundaries a little and practice moving along the spectrum with awareness and fluidity. On the large scale, is there a major project you could push yourself to explore? Long term, is there a skill or career area you’d like to explore? Again, the goal isn’t the magnitude of the change, it’s being conscious and approaching things with intention, on scales both small and large. I tend to be an explorer, so I’m super curious to hear of your adventures. Please reply to this email and let me know what you explored this week! Stay legendary! 👑 <— new sign off 😆 Kevin |
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