Life as Experiment

Whether it’s your investment portfolio, your health, your education, or your relationships, life is a day-by-day scientific experiment of testing ideas that worked for others and applying them to yourself.

Statistics show us that certain methodologies or ways of living work better for the majority of the population. Some are more likely to work better for you specifically. But this doesn’t guarantee they will work for you.

Every day is a day of taking ideas from others, testing those ideas on yourself, and, depending on whether it’s a short-term or long-term idea, finding out whether those ideas are effective for you.

One of the biggest problems we face is the inability to measure and stay on top of where we are and how our decisions affect us on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

The financial experiment: my dad’s story

Let me give you a personal example. My dad is planning for his retirement. In 2008, he made a decision to change the allocation of his portfolio because he was afraid of political outcomes. He decided to get out of equities and move into cash because he was worried that the person taking over in politics would cause the market to tank.

This is not the first time. What happened, of course, is that he missed out on a surge in the market. This is what’s traditionally known as behavioral risk.

Fast forward to today. He sees what’s going on with interest rates, the turmoil overseas and at home, and, after previously putting all of his money back in the market, he decided to pull it all out again. He was worried about a short-term market drop before he’d need his money. He’s also in a place where he doesn’t have enough money to fully cover himself in retirement, so he’s looking for higher returns while simultaneously trying to time the market out of fear.

What happened again? He took his money out of the market right before the market went back up.

This is understandable. He didn’t have a way to check against his own previous decisions from a long time ago. He had no confirmation of what the best decision would be, not based on what everybody else says, but based on what has actually worked for him.

The health experiment: my story

Let’s go to a more personal example: healthcare. For my entire life post-living with my parents, I’ve struggled with managing and maintaining my health and fitness, whether it’s my diet, exercise, or just my general decisions on how I treat my body. I have not had a direct way of knowing what works best for me.

When I went into college, I was small and wanted to get stronger and build muscle. So what did I do? I followed “bro science”: lifted 2-3 times a week with poor form and ate to get larger. I didn’t exercise enough to make up for the extra calories I was taking in. I did get a little stronger, but mostly I just got fatter.

From there, I started to do cardio and eat less. This was great, I started to lose the weight, but I also lost my muscle along with it. These decisions, over long periods of time, ended up with clear trends and clear outcomes. But in the period, I did not have a clear way to check myself against this, so I forgot about it and focused on building my brain and my career. This led me to get further out of shape.

From there, I tried many diets: keto, fasting, Atkins, low-carb, high-fat, everything that was out there. I attempted everything. What I read at the time was telling me that weight was 90% diet and 10% exercise. Great! I can focus on just my diet, and as long as I’m moving around during the day, I’ll get healthy. But of course, that’s not how it works.

At this time, everything was all about “calories in, calories out.” I like to eat junk food, so great, as long as I just eat a small amount of junk food and it’s less than the calories I’m putting out, I’ll get healthy, right? Day in and day out, I continued to gain weight, even though MyFitnessPal was telling me I took in less calories than I was putting out.

Now, of course, the metabolic process is much more complex than that. But that’s not what all the popular science said.

The expert knowledge problem

More recently, there’s been a growth in celebrity doctors who preach things about eating all-natural foods and organic diets. But they don’t tell you how hard it is to actually find food in the United States that hasn’t been treated with pesticides, hasn’t come from other countries, and is actually fresh, clean food. They also don’t tell you that the drinking water you have on a daily basis, even when it’s filtered, contains thousands of chemicals that can ruin your body’s ability to metabolize.

So what am I to do?

There are podcasters out there like Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman who put out amazing research and ideas. Many of them are data-driven and meant to help you make good decisions over long periods of time to stay healthier and improve what Peter calls “health span” in Medicine 3.0.

But how am I supposed to take this and apply it to myself? I don’t have the money to fly down to see Peter Attia and pay him and his team to be my personal doctors, as much as I wish I did. What happens if I build tools to implement these ideas, and although they may work for most people, they don’t work for me?

What I really need is a way to take these ideas and quickly test them against my own experiences, whether through a historical backtest or by tracking biomarkers starting today.

The solution: your personal lab notebook

This is the experiment I’m running: building an easy way to track how certain ideas affect me and which ones make the most difference in my own life. This allows me to prioritize the decisions that actually work for me as an individual rather than those that tend to work best for the masses.

I work in the financial industry, building portfolio management tools for investment advisors. But I personally don’t have an easy way to aggregate all of my financial data, my savings, spending, debt, and investments, all in one place. I work in this industry, and I have no way of getting this information easily for myself, let alone someone who doesn’t know how to interpret it or what tools are even available.

The same goes for your health. The same goes for your relationships. The same goes for your career.

How do we get a view, not only of whether our decisions are good or bad and how they’ve turned out over time, but also to take that into account for future decisions and connect those future decisions to our past decisions and their outcomes?

What’s next

This leads to my mission across three core areas: finance, health, and education. I’m building tools that make information, and the measurement of your own experiments, easy to access for everyone.

Not tools that tell you what to do. Tools that remember what you’ve tried, measure what actually happened, and help you make better decisions based on your results, not someone else’s.

Because life is an experiment. And you deserve a lab notebook.