1: “The fog was thick that day,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
It was the evening of September 8, 1923.
“Captain Edward H. Watson and Lieutenant Commander Donald T. Hunter were leading a fleet of warships on an engineering run off the coast of Southern California,” Anne-Laure writes.
“Because of the poor visibility, Captain Hunter had been navigating by dead reckoning, an age-old technique that involves estimating your current position by using a previously determined position and incorporating estimates of speed and direction.
“It was not the most precise way to proceed,” she notes, “but [Edward] was a veteran mariner and felt he had a good idea of their location.”
Another complicating factor was that the simulation was designed to replicate wartime conditions.
“Which meant that maintaining the fastest possible speed was predefined as a hard requirement for success,” Anne Laure recounts.
Then, just as Edward and Donald were about to give the order to turn left into the Santa Barbara channel, they received a signal from the navy station on the coast. The ship’s position was completely different from their dead reckoning estimates.
“Impossible bearing!” Edward shouted.
A radio recording would immortalize his words.
“Faced with conflicting data, the captain and the lieutenant commander could have chosen to slow down and take measurements of water depths, prioritizing safety over speed and real-time data over instinct,” Anne-Laure writes.
“But slowing down would have required them to abandon the predefined parameters for success.”
So they did not.
What happened? “The USS Delphy ran aground,” she explains, “leading six other ships to destruction in a disastrous procession.
“Twenty-three sailors died that day. Known as the Honda Point disaster,” Anne-Laure writes, “it was the largest ever peacetime loss of American navy ships.”
2: What can we learn from this terrible disaster?
“The real lesson here,” says Stanford professor Paul Saffo, “is about uncertainty.
“When the Delphy skipper hit the rocks along,” Paul notes, “because he narrowed his cone of uncertainty at the very moment that the data was screaming to widen it.”
They “decided to ignore new information and stick to their plan,” Anne-Laure notes, even though they were navigating in a thick fog that obscured where their ship was.
Sometimes staying the course is not our best option.
When we approach life with an experimental mindset, our primary goal is to learn, grow, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world.
We are deliberate about remaining open to the indicators that suggest we need to change our thinking.
3: As decision-makers, yes, we can stay the course. We can persist. But we can also pause or pivot. These are, according to Anne Laure, “equally valid choices when made deliberately.”
Choice A: Pause.
“Whether it is draining too much energy, negatively affecting our personal or professional lives, or clashing with other commitments,” Anne-Laure writes, we can decide an experiment isn’t going well.
We can quit or pause.
“Most of us,” she observes, “have at least once created a white elephant for ourselves, whether it’s staying in a job despite feeling miserable, continuing to invest in a failing business because we’ve already spent lots of money trying to make it work, or not breaking up because we’ve been in a relationship with someone for so long already.”
Rather than walk away, however, we continue to put in the effort, despite the increasingly negative outcomes.
“The stigma attached to quitting often clouds our judgment,” Anne-Laure notes, “and can keep us tethered to a project that drains our physical, cognitive, and emotional resources.”
One trap? The sunk cost fallacy: “The irrational reasoning that further investment—be it time, money, or effort—must be made simply because of the initial investment,” she writes, “regardless of the current and future value of that project.
“We have poured so much energy and hope into a project that it feels impossible to withdraw. We are also scared of what people would think.”
In these cases, the most courageous thing we can do is admit our current course of action isn’t serving us or others.
As serial entrepreneur Seth Godin observes, “Quitting the projects that don’t go anywhere is essential if we want to stick out the right ones.”
Choice B: Pivot.
We realize “the experiment could benefit from some tweaks, whether that is increasing or decreasing its scope or changing our tools and tactics,” Anne-Laure explains.
“Though the fundamentals of the pact will remain the same,” she writes, we “sense a slight course correction could be beneficial.”
Anne-Laure shares a personal story to make this point. She had committed to writing and posting one article every weekday for 100 days.
Twenty weeks later, she had accomplished her goal.
“Writing brought me lots of joy,” she recollects, “so once I completed the first pact, I decided to persist for a while.”
But as her newsletter gained traction, she began receiving other opportunities, including building a community, coaching, and hosting workshops.
“After a while, it became evident that I needed to scale my pact down,” Anne Laure writes. “I first reduced my commitment to three articles a week, then two.
“And when I started writing this book, I scaled it down again to only one article a week,” she shares.
What happened? “Not only is the newsletter still going after five years—which in and of itself is something I’m proud of—but it has engagement rates ten times above average. Crucially, I’m still having tons of fun.”
Choice C: Persist.
“The wind is in our sails. We are enjoying our ongoing experiment and starting to reap its rewards, learning more about ourselves and the world around us,” Anne-Laure describes.
“Now we get to decide what our next growth loop will look like,” she suggests.
“If our pact was to write a five-hundred-word journal entry every day, we’re already envisioning a book project.
If our pact was to spend forty-five minutes on Sundays learning how to edit videos, we’re thinking about how to become a YouTube star.”
The assumption is that when things go well, the next logical step is to raise the stakes.
“Our economy is built not on the notion of enough but on the notion of more. Bigger, better, higher, faster,” Anne-Laure observes.
So, “we press on to the next level. But completing a pact doesn’t mean we must now strive for more.”
We may decide to raise the stakes. Or, we may choose simply to continue what we are doing.
Anne-Laure challenged herself to meditate for fifteen minutes a day for fifteen days.
“The experiment was a resounding success,” she writes. “Not only did I not miss a day, but I actually enjoyed it.”
What happened next? “As soon as I completed the last day, my mind started racing. I wanted to try longer meditations, maybe one or two hours a day. I started looking up formal meditation training. I researched some intensive online courses, which required spending an entire weekend without outside contact. I also found a ten-day silent retreat not far from where I lived.”
Then, she realized she could simply continue with her current practice, one she enjoyed and was benefiting from.
“Why do so many people blaze past the obvious option to simply stay the course?” Anne-Laure asks. “I’ve consciously chosen the term persist to describe this option because it implies a decisive and daring move—which in our world of hustle, it is.”
More tomorrow!
__________________________
Reflection: Am I truly listening to feedback and new information, or am I stuck staying the course even when signs urge a change?
Action: Identify one experiment or commitment in my life where I could deliberately choose to pause, pivot, or persist based on evidence—not just habit or sunk costs.
What did you think of this post?
