Experiment: Acts of Gratitude & Curiosity

Welcome to my first experiment post!

After all, this is the Adam Experiment and one of my intentions is to share with you the experiments I’m running. I started one this week by accident thanks to all of you.

As I was adding your emails to my list, I felt a tremendous amount of gratitude to each of you. At that moment, I realized that I wanted to tell you specifically what I appreciate.

I got busy 🙄 bad excuse, but c’est la vie.

Then Diana Kander text me Happy Birthday which led to this…

And Oh. My. God. did that feel good!

But it also triggered something deeper for me. I became aware of how much I’ve shied away from people who inspire me. I realized that there’s a category of people, like Diana, who I avoid.

Why do I avoid them? A toxic combination of false beliefs and unfounded fears. Here are a few that I discovered when I decided to get curious…

• Fear that they won’t think I’m worth their time, therefore signaling that I’m not good enough as a person.

• Belief that I have to have something insightful and important to say or they won’t respond.

• Fear that if they help me, I won’t live up to their expectations.

But here’s the thing. Most of the time I don’t even want anything from these people! I only want to tell them how much I appreciate them for what I’ve been able to learn.

What I realized in doing this exercise is how much I’ve missed out on over the years because this used to be something I did without question. I was prolific! Some of my friends called this out as being fearless to contact anyone. And then life happened.

So what shifted?

That pain of possibly missing out on amazing relationships and opportunities is far greater than the anticipated pain of being rejected.

Flipping this equation helped me to come up with my experiment and personal challenge.

Personal Challenge & Experiment

Target: 100 messages of gratitude or curiosity

Purpose: Rewire the beliefs and fears mentioned above.

Criteria:

Anytime I feel gratitude or appreciation, I will find a way to tell that person. Anytime I have a question or have an insight, I will reach out without holding back.

Targets: Anyone I feel some amount of discomfort reaching out to.

Note: I’m also focused on expressing gratitude and appreciation to people I interact with regularly because they’re important too, but I’ll only be tracking times when I feel discomfort.

I’ll be tracking everything below if you want to follow along.

I hope some of you will join me!

Experiment Log (3/100)

Diana Kander - Gratitude for being an awesome role model for ambition and experimentation, and always being there.

Dave Gerhardt - Gratitude for sharing openly, being authentic, and inspiring me.

Flo Crivello - Gratitude for building a cool AI company and sharing personal insights on his blog.