Welcome to NextLetter, where Frederik Pferdt helps you become one step closer to your next opportunity.

Try It, You’ll Like It 

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in my grandfather’s garage. Filled with airplane engineer tools, the garage smelled exactly like you’d expect it to. Oily and dusty.

Some might consider it a mess. I thought of it as a playground.

I tinkered there all the time. Once, I built a wooden ship that sank. Another time, I spent years building and fiddling with a scooter that I planned to drive before I earned my driver’s license. In fact, when I turned 16, I took it down to the place to get my license and ended up colliding with a car on the way there. While that day didn’t turn out too well, I played around so much with the cylinders and exhaust that I turned it into the fastest scooter around town. 

That garage was my symbolic (and first) center of enterprise and innovation, but I’ve spent my whole life with the belief that experimentation—even with the threat of failure—is the cornerstone for building a future.

In my career, I always measured myself against those who seemed to know where they were going (they always said their careers were the best). So I experimented with as many jobs as I could—consulting, academics, start-ups, even considering a run as a chef (though nobody let me in their kitchen). I did the same with the places where I wanted to live—trying different cities and different continents.

I knew I couldn’t just hear about those careers or cities from other people. I had to experience them, even if it meant quitting gigs at top consulting companies after four weeks. I had to learn them by being immersed in them. I had to experiment with everything to know what worked for me. 

The idea of testing ideas rapidly and repeatedly as a way of learning is what I call perpetual experimentation, another dimension of a future-ready mindstate that I outline in my new book, What’s Next is Now. 

When I led innovation and creativity programs at Google X, one of the things I developed was the Google Garage, a large space open 24/7 that was just filled with everything—car parts we got from a junk yard, sewing machines, 3D printers, Legos and Play-Doh, an old school bus (that was no small feat). We wanted to send the message that “anything goes here” and “something is happening here” with no expectations for outcomes.

In fact, the only outcome we wanted was to reinforce the belief that experimenting and tinkering is how learning happens.

Today, I understand that from the moment we come to this world, every day is uncertain. We are constantly experimenting to learn what will happen next. The result of each experiment feeds into the next experiment, as we figure out how we work and how the world works.

Uncertainty leads to surprises, and these create opportunities.

These experiments are what propels us to the future.

Quote I Love

Obsess Less, Try More

When my friend and former colleague Tom Chi, a founding member of Google X and a founding partner of a venture capital venture firm, kicks off a project, he outlines it like this:

Here’s where we are today. And here’s where we want to end up. But you have no idea how you’re going to get there.

The only way to fail, he says, is by taking no action. But when you take action, you will either get to where you want or learn that it’s the wrong way—and then make adjustments to get on a good path. Those many iterations that happen along the way are what makes it work.

On the first day of the Google Glass project, he told his team that they would do 15 hardware prototypes a week for 10 weeks. With three people, that was one prototype a day per person.

“With such rapid experimentation,” he says, “my team didn’t get attached to the outcome of any experiment because they knew they’d be doing a different one tomorrow.”

All of those experiments served as data that would lead to the next idea and the next one and the next one. Moving quickly removed the usual barriers to innovation (being too attached to an initial idea, being complacent, etc…).

What if we adopted that same philosophy in our own lives? 

At Google X, we had a day every year where we threw a bunch of ideas and business plans into a coffin (we called the ritual “day of the dead”). Literally and symbolically, we were letting go of old ideas. 

Why? Because we needed to make room for the new ones.

Try Me

Someone recently asked me if I have a version of the Google Garage in my own life. I do have tangible spaces. One is our family art studio, where we make our own candles and our own salt and lots of other things.

Another: My Geodesic Dome. It started as a guest house that I built with friends on December 1, 2019. But when the pandemic hit three months later, we turned it into a schoolhouse for my three kids, as well as my office.

It would be a mistake, however, to just think of the mindstate of perpetual experimentation as needing a physical space.

Experimentation is not about being tied to a where. It’s about being committed to the how. 

Find ways to rapidly prototype and test ideas—it can be about work projects (we had 10 different ideas for the subject line of this NextLetter), family Saturday outings, recipes, your golf swing, the way you meditate, anything.

By doing this, you become less attached to “one thing,” which gives yourself more room to develop a more powerful thing.

Stop being so attached to a certain way, a certain idea, a certain habit—and relying on external feedback from others as a major metric for success. Instead, use experimentation as your greatest learning tool and tap into your internal feedback—how you feel—to determine what you do next.

Mess Up Your Morning

If you receive a flood of posts from “morning routine” influencers, you may believe that locking into a schedule (some variation of eat, plunge, exercise!) is the key to success. 

To embrace the notion of perpetual experimentation, treat your “morning routine” as anything but routine.

Consider all the things you need and want to do—eating a healthy breakfast, having a good workout, doing a deep stretch, taking a shivering shower, meditating, reading, walking, whatever you like.

Now mix it up. You can change the variables—how long you do the activities or the order you do them. Or you can change the kinds of things you do—read a book instead of Instagram captions, walk in the yard barefoot instead of the sidewalk, eat a salad instead of an egg. It doesn’t matter what the change is; just change.

Be in tune to how you feel—and what makes you feel that way. The more you play with the variables, the more you learn about yourself.

And what works best for you. 

Let me know what happened after you juggled around your morning routine. Reply to this email, and I may share your experience in a future NextLetter. My new book, What’s Next is Now, is available now.