The Box Experiment

I guess one of the things you could ask me is why. Why would I be doing this?

I’ll start by saying that I’ve always had trouble making decisions, especially when the options are many.

Decisions are pretty interesting if you think about it. Say you have to make a decision about something important, choosing one thing over another can seem like a daunting task. Choosing one thing over another ultimately means deciding to put yourself into a completely different situation in the near future and that single decision will lead to many others that stem from that first one like ripples in water.

Each time you decide you’re creating little butterfly effects in your life, and who knows where it’ll all lead you.

When a decision is about something small and unimportant it doesn’t really matter what you choose, which can paradoxically make it harder to decide.

The Box is all about taking action and change. I can’t let my indecisiveness and the many ideas I constantly have stop me from actually doing stuff. That’s all that matters, doing the things you want to do. The things you dream of doing.

So this is what I came up with. I wrote down a whole series of things I want to do on little slips of paper, folded them up and put them in a box. Some of the things are projects and business ideas, others are cool activities and such.

Each day I’ll wake up, mix all the scary folded little change-catalysts in a black leather bag and then pick one. That’s it. That’s what I’ll do that day. If it takes longer than a day to complete the task I’ll keep working on it, but I’ll still unfold another paper slip the next day, and the next, and the next.

“The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”