The Lean Startup, life edition

Hello! It's me, your overthinking friend.

During college, analysis paralysis was my default state. Choosing a major felt like a life sentence I couldn't afford to get wrong. Every few months, I’d call my parents in tears, overwhelmed by doubts about my path and my rising student debt. I'm not confident I want to be a s̶p̶e̶e̶c̶h̶ p̶a̶t̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶s̶t n̶u̶r̶s̶e b̶i̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶s̶t t̶e̶a̶c̶h̶e̶r p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶s̶t d̶e̶s̶k̶ j̶o̶c̶k̶e̶y c̶o̶p̶y̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶r e̶n̶t̶r̶e̶p̶r̶e̶n̶e̶u̶r journalist. What if I change my mind?

Well, I did change my mind. Several times. I'm still continuing to change my mind about my career to this day! My parents' tireless advice—whatever I got a degree in wouldn't matter much in the grand scheme of things—turned out to be true. I don't use my Journalism degree and the world hasn't exploded.

After graduating, I entered a phase of life I'll call "throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks." I moved to Thailand and taught English. I moved back to the US and worked as a wilderness therapy guide. Only after guiding 8-day-long trips in the woods for several months did I begin to desire more routine, stability, and intellectual challenge. I'd met a handful of digital nomad software developers while living in Thailand, which planted the seed of learning to code.

Feeling stuck = missing data

Choosing what to study, what career path to pursue, where to live, and who to date have big impact on our lives. Perhaps my biggest learning on making decisions is this: when you're at a decision point, you can't think your way to clarity.

You simply need more input. If you had all of the information necessary, you wouldn't feel stuck. You'd just take the next step in the clearly desired direction.

After I learned to code and started working at startups, I read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. His book argues that favorable outcomes don't come from having the right idea from the get-go; instead, it's about speed: being able to rapidly run experiments, gather feedback, and iterate accordingly determines success. It clicked—this is how I'd been approaching life.

I spent my time off from wilderness guiding teaching myself Javascript on Codecademy and tinkering with websites. I loved it—good evidence that a bootcamp was a good next step.

The beauty of small experiments is that they're two-way door decisions: changeable, reversible, and low impact.

Consider the opposite of this, or the typical way people go about making life changes:

• I immediately feel overwhelmed by the prospect of change and uncertainty. I try to think my way to clarity, insistent that I'll be ready to make that big decision once I'm certain about what to do. I say I just need more time, but end up never taking action.
• Or, I make a spectacular, sweeping, risky decision that completely overhauls my life. Maybe the one-way door decision doesn't turn out how I expect and I regret it.

Rather than having clarity on exactly what the right decision is, often we just need to make a decision (a small one!), get feedback from it, and then iterate from there.

Life is more enjoyable when I'm biased towards action, trying new things and running experiments, persevering when things are working well and changing course when they aren't.

Friends will often comment about my wide variety of experiences I've had throughout my 20s. Alongside teaching English in Thailand and working as a wilderness therapy guide, I've gone to a coding bootcamp and become a software engineer. I've lived in 5 different states, traveled through Latin America as a digital nomad, and lived/worked out of a teardrop trailer while road-tripping throughout the western US. I've been a part of a variety of cool early-stage startups, fine tuned what type of work environments I thrive in, learned regenerative farming, and hiked nearly 500 miles across the state of Colorado.

Each one was an experiment that has taught me something new and helped refine my worldview, values, interests, and skills.

Embracing Experimentation in a Changing World

I'm a big proponent of championing breadth over depth. Someone willing to try new things and change course often will not only know themselves better, but will also see interdisciplinary connections across fields and be able to adapt and innovate better in novel situations. David Epstein writes about this concept in Range, one of my favorite books.

In a world where computers excel at specialization, our true human advantage lies in creativity, adaptability, and connecting the dots across disciplines. Embrace experimentation—it's through this process that we learn, grow, and navigate life’s uncertainties with purpose and joy.