There were those calf-nursing bottles full of booze that I sold at college football games. My college mates were cheap drunks who lugged beer kegs into the stands and I was left sucking my calf-nursing bottle nipple full of gin and tonics.
In my early hospitality days, I created a fondue restaurant in the basement of an ugly building in a dodgy neighborhood. Nope, that didn’t work.
Years later, I created Fest300, a website dedicated to festival connoisseurs with an annual list of the 300 best festivals in the world. Didn’t make any money, but I was fortunate enough to experience 36 festivals in 16 countries in one year.
Rather than call these failures, I labeled them “noble experiments.” But, recently I’ve come to realize that we often mistake an experiment for an exploration.
An experiment begins with a hypothesis — a tidy question that seeks a tidy answer. You set the variables, control the conditions, and measure the outcome. It’s about certainty: did it work, or didn’t it? The goal is to confirm or correct what we already believe.
Exploration, on the other hand, begins with mystery. It asks a different kind of question — one without a known answer, sometimes without words at all. You don’t set the conditions; you surrender to them. The explorer’s reward isn’t data — it’s discovery. Not proof, but wonder.
In our careers, our relationships, and even our spiritual lives, we’re conditioned to think like experimenters. We seek predictable results. We design our lives for efficiency, control, and measurable progress.
But the most meaningful transformations — the ones that rearrange our sense of who we are — rarely come from experiments. They come from stepping into the dark with curiosity as our only compass.
Exploration requires humility. It’s an act of faith in what we can’t yet see — in landscapes within and beyond us that only reveal themselves to the open-hearted.
When we explore, we give up the safety of the lab for the mystery of the wilderness. We trade knowing for not knowing — and that’s where revelation lives.
Maybe the great task of the second half of life is to stop experimenting with who we’re supposed to be… and start exploring who we’ve always been, underneath the hypotheses, the plans, and the fear of getting it wrong.
Because life isn’t meant to be proven. It’s meant to be discovered.
-Chip