The Experiment Mindset
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Kagan's reframe for both building businesses and spending money: run everything as an experiment rather than a verdict on you. Because an experiment can only produce data, a failed one does not make you a failure — it makes the next one better informed. That removes the pressure that stops people starting and, more importantly, stops them from continuing after the first few attempts die. His empirical claim is that the most successful people have experimented the most; he ran conferences, discount cards and software nobody ever saw before AppSumo worked. The same logic applies to money: rather than accepting received wisdom that money cannot buy happiness, he tested it directly — renting a Malibu house, a lake house, a Lamborghini — and kept only what actually improved his life.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
State it as an experiment with a hypothesis
Say 'I'm going to try a cookie business' or 'I'm going to test whether business class is worth it' rather than 'I'm launching' or 'I'm buying'. The wording carries the psychological load.
- 2
Cap the cost in time and money
Abdaal ran part-time medicine plus part-time YouTube for a few weeks. Kagan rented a Lamborghini for $250 on Turo rather than buying one. Small enough to repeat is the design constraint.
Pro tip Rent or trial before you commit capital.
- 3
Actually run it
The data only exists if the experiment happens. This is where now-not-how applies: run it this week rather than planning the ideal version.
- 4
Read the result, not your self-worth
Kagan's framing when something fails is 'all right, that didn't work — what can I learn from it', explicitly not 'I'm a failure'. That separation is the whole mechanism.
Watch out If a failed test makes you want to blow the whole thing up, the experiment was scoped too large.
- 5
Act on the finding, then run the next one
Keep what works, drop what does not, immediately start another. Abdaal found he disliked part-time medicine and stopped; Kagan found he did not care about owning a Lamborghini and moved on.
- 6
Extend it to how you spend
Test whether more expensive versions actually make you happier — Airbnb versus hotel, economy delight versus upper class. Abdaal found economy delight was as good as a £15,000 upper-class seat.
Pro tip Log the results so the data compounds over years.
In the wild
Rather than assuming a supercar would make him happy or that it would not, Kagan rented a Lamborghini in LA for $250 on Turo during Covid. His conclusion was immediate and clear: he did not care for it at all. He ran the same experiment upward with a $25,000 Malibu beach house and a $7,000 lake house in Austin, which he did enjoy. He also tested having a six-pack, decided it sucked because he likes drinking and eating, and dropped it.
→ A $250 test permanently closed off an expensive assumption about what he wanted.
Torn between medicine and YouTube, Abdaal ran the split as an explicit experiment for a few weeks and discovered he did not enjoy part-time medicine. He still clung to the story that he needed the security until Lewis Howes challenged him on how long it would take to rebuild to £100,000 a year from zero — Abdaal said a year or two, Howes suggested six months, and Abdaal realised he probably could. The experiment had already answered the question; the story was what remained.
→ A few weeks of testing settled a career decision he had been agonising over.
Common mistakes
Reading a failed test as a personal verdict
Kagan's whole point is that when an experiment fails you do not give up and blow the thing up — you learn and run another. Treating one dead business as evidence about you ends the sequence early.
Making the experiment too expensive to repeat
Buying the car, quitting the job outright or building the full product means one result consumes all your capital and there is no next test.
From the transcript
“when you think of it as an experiment you're not putting so much pressure on yourself to succeed”
“most of the most successful people have experimented the most”
“I rented a Lambo here in LA uh a few years ago during that that experience for $250 on turo”
From the episode
How To Start Your First Business in 48 Hours - Noah Kagan
Noah Kagan