Drew Barontini | Lived Experience

I’m in an Uber on the way to a customer’s offices in New York.

I’m crossing the Whitestone Bridge while the city skyline frames my view out the left window. I’m only passing through this time. I won’t get to see or experience the city, but its proximity is still comforting either way.

I’ve loved New York City ever since my first visit years ago. Last year, I witnessed my kids experience it for the first time. They loved it so much they always ask to go back.

Experience is the source of knowledge

On the plane, I read How to Live by Sarah Bakewell, a biographical exploration of Michel de Montaigne, the French philosopher and essayist of the 16th century. His most famous work, Essays, was written over the course of 20+ years. In it, Montaigne explores his own personal experiences and engages with deeply introspective writing and thinking. He was drawing lessons from the real experiences he was going through in life. He studied each experience—even the most mundane—in rich detail. Doing so allowed him to extract insights and practical knowledge to, in turn, improve his judgement and quality of life.

If you notice more of the experiences you go through, you begin to appreciate them more. As Leonardo da Vinci says, “All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.” When we notice more, we feel more, and we live better.

Thinking improves when it meets other ideas

That’s part of what writing became for me. I write to think and explore topics I’m wrestling with. Montaigne would regularly flourish a thought with the concession that he doesn’t know, a beautiful period on the end of a poignant insight. Because we don’t know. If you venture outside the physical laws of nature and submerge yourself in your own Self, you are engaging with your own perceptions, assumptions, and beliefs.

What’s true to you isn’t necessarily a truth. But it is your truth.

The only way forward is to bring your thoughts out into the open and mix them with other ideas—to ask questions and find the gap between the current and desired state.

What did someone from a previous time say?

What do my contemporaries believe today?

What am I noticing, thinking, feeling?

The word praxis is from the Ancient Greek and part of Aristotle’s three basic human activities:

Theoria (thinking)
Poiesis (making)
Praxis (doing)

The end goal of praxis (or doing) was action, moving beyond the theoretical into reality where you practice what you’ve learned.

Understanding becomes embodied through action

I’m a trial-by-fire learner. I learn by doing. I don’t fully understand something until I engage with it. I have to take it apart and put it back together again. When I wanted to learn a new programming language, I would build a new app in that language. It’s also why I did well in school, but not great. I only excelled in college because I could design and program on real projects and then apply that to my major.

You can’t truly and fully understand something until you work with it in reality and learn by doing. Everything before that point is a simulation. We have powerful brains capable of immense imagination, but also a gravitational pull toward entropy. When we move to action, leverage the knowledge, and apply our skills through lived experience, then we become fully embodied.

Three Models of Praxis

In Issue #105, we discussed KnowFlow, my system for developing understanding.

In Issue #106, we discussed Solarium, my system for expanding understanding.

And now we close with Praxis, my system for embodying understanding, bringing us to the conclusion of this three-part series.

KnowFlow for developing understanding.
Solarium for expanding perspective.
Praxis for embodying understanding.

The three models of Praxis are:

Adaptive Experimentation to test your hunches and learn from reality.
Embodied Practice to build habits and routines of intentional behavior.
Sustainable Rhythm to find a pace that builds momentum and growth.

Adaptive Experimentation

At the end of 1901, the Wright brothers were disappointed by their flight tests. Their aircraft were not performing to the level they expected based on their designs. This made them question the data they were relying on, so they started running experiments. The goal was to iteratively adjust the math and the designs until the performance improved. They went as far as building their own wind tunnel so they could have complete control over the variables. They built models of their wing designs using materials in their bike shop, and then they iteratively tested, changed one variable at a time, and recorded the most detailed data in the world for the design of aircraft wings. Experimentation drove learning and carved the path to success.

Experiments turn uncertainty into knowledge

When experimentation is done well, you use each new data point as a learning to inform the next step. You take detailed notes to document observations, like dropping a trail of breadcrumbs in the woods so you can make your way back to where you started.

Failure points to the next step

Adaptive Experimentation is the first model of Praxis because you should test your hunches. If you get better at noticing patterns (the first steps of KnowFlow), you then need to test your theories with experiments designed to guide you.

A failure isn’t a failure because it points you where to go next. That’s learning.

Surprise creates an opportunity to learn

The word adaptive is important because you need to be prepared to be wrong. I see a lot of people excited to test an idea, yet disappointed when the result is different than they expected. Expectations can be dangerous if they prevent you from seeing the opportunity an unexpected development brings.

Humans don’t like to be wrong, but learning requires being wrong. A lot. I’m the most excited in product work when we make a change expecting a certain outcome, but the result is the opposite. Nothing stokes the fire of curiosity like an unexpected surprise.

Lean into it. Get curious. Ask questions. And then write down what you noticed, how your perspective changed, and what you want to test next. This is why “Test” is a key part of my KnowFlow system. It leads to knowledge.

Always keep an experimental mindset.

Embodied Practice

At the risk of sounding pretentious and starting a sentence with “the Dictionary defines X as…”, I’d like to talk about the word “embody” as a definition:

To clearly show, represent, or express an abstract idea, quality, or feeling in a real, visible, or tangible way.

Knowledge becomes real through practice

For our context, “in a real, visible, or tangible way” is the important part.

Real instead of a simulation.

Visible instead of a representation.

Tangible instead of an abstraction.

Our brains are complex. We constantly live outside the present moment, imagining what may happen in the future, and revisiting what already happened in the past.

Embodied Practice is how we stay in the present and put knowledge to action.

As Aristotle says:

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

Habits turn beliefs into behavior

In Praxis, this comes to life through habits. A habit is a repeated behavior started by a trigger to complete a routine in order to achieve an outcome or receive a reward. Habits are powerful because, once they become embedded, our brains stop fully participating in the decision-making. Think about the last time you put on a seatbelt or closed your garage or completed any other routine behavior. You typically don’t remember doing it because the parts of your brain involved in the habit turn off. You do it “out of habit.”

I have five keystone habits. Each habit is tied directly to my five core values. I do this so I know that the things I believe in are practiced fully each day. If you want to embody your beliefs, habits are the perfect vehicle to make them real, visible, and tangible.

Consistent containers make practice easier

To give you a simple work example, one of my longtime habits has been a 30-minute block for the first and last 30 minutes of my day.

The Startup Routine is the first 30 minutes.

The Shutdown Routine is the last 30 minutes.

I use this space to go through a checklist of items. I clear out notifications, check systems, and prep for the work ahead. When I need to start doing something new, I just add it to the list. I already reserve the space, so integration is seamless.

Another example is integrating what I read. I read a lot of books. If I could spend every day reading, writing, and walking, I’d be happy. I’ve experimented with many techniques for capturing learnings from books over the years: mind maps, lists, notecards. As I’ve become more sensitive to noticing signals, I try the less-is-more approach with reading. I like to let anything that resonates with me emerge naturally.

If I put the book down and I’m still thinking about something, I write it down.

If I’m reflecting on what the book taught me, I write it down.

Most of the time, I just read. Oftentimes, little ideas will connect with me later or when I’m talking about the book or reading something else. Organic and unexpected connections are like an invisible thread weaving disparate ideas together.

Find the habits that bring your beliefs and knowledge into a living, embodied practice.

Sustainable Rhythm

When I moved from Birmingham, Alabama to West Palm Beach, Florida after my freshman year of high school, it was a culture shock. I left the deep south, sports, and the city for South Florida, music, and the beach. I still played sports, but eventually became friends with a group in high school that played music. I taught myself guitar and become the bass player in the band throughout high school and into my first year of college. I spent my time playing music, listening to music, and going to the beach to surf and skimboard.

Rhythm creates momentum

I was happy to be in a band, but I always wanted to be a guitarist instead of a bass player. But then, like anything I do, I fully devoted myself to it. I watched bass players at live shows, on YouTube videos, and saved up money to buy better equipment. I eventually grew to have immense respect for the bass. If you listen to a bass and nothing else, it doesn’t stand out like a guitar. But without bass, there’s a hollow, empty sound to the music. Like the drums, the bass keeps the beat, the pace, the rhythm.

A shared heartbeat keeps teams aligned

The importance of rhythm is a lesson I repeatedly learned through leading teams. To make rhythm sustainable, you need to know how to pace yourself, like running a marathon and keeping a consistent pace throughout. And you also need to know what activities fit in your process. Tony Fadell, creator of the Nest thermostat, uses the word “heartbeat” as an external time constraint—a deadline, launch, or other fixed milestone.

I like to define a heartbeat more broadly as the consistent rituals, tangible artifacts, and clear constraints as part of a team. In Issue #63, I defined the Product Heartbeat as:

The Product Heartbeat is context delivered on a cadence to create consistency, which builds momentum.

The pulse has two beats:

Alignment: the activity through which people form shared context.
Visibility: the artifact that distributes that context.

One of the first changes I made in my new role over a year ago was to start doing Weekly Updates—a weekly video sharing context. Every Monday, I record a video where I talk about and share updates about the product. It’s shared in a public channel everyone in the company has access to. Context widely distributed.

Sustainable systems improve over time

I also practice other team rituals and my own personal ones as well. What matters is finding the rhythm that fits you, your team, and your company, and to continually experiment with making it better. Like the startup and shutdown routines, you create a container for continuous improvement. If someone wants to see more metrics in the weekly video, I can add that. I don’t have to spin up a new process because one already exists. I just modify it.

Sustainable Rhythm is the final model of Praxis.

Think about your own rhythms, your team’s rhythms, and your company’s rhythms.

Find the pace that’s sustainable to build momentum.

Your Praxis

Now it’s your turn. Think about everything you’re learning and put it into practice. Design experiments, learn by doing, and find a sustainable rhythm for your work.

Notice the pattern. When you look for more, you’ll see more. Write it down. Turn your interest into an inquiry. Frame the question.
Design the experiment. Test your assumption. Write down what you believe will happen and then follow up with notes about what actually happened.
Run the test. You only learn from reality. Test your hunches. Take what you learn and do something with it.
Make the change. When you learn it, live it. Embody the expression of whatever new knowledge you’ve acquired in the process.
Keep the pace. Continuously improve and iterate. Get better by building a flywheel of growth and development built on a sustainable pace.

Master Keys

Leonardo da Vinci wanted to understand what water does when it meets a shaped obstacle. Understanding the properties of something requires peering under the surface to find the underlying principle. To do this, Leonardo designed real experiments to understand the properties of flowing water so he could apply the learnings. A principle is a transferable unit of knowledge you can apply broadly. Leonardo used this for his engineering work, to understand the human body, and for painting realistic water.

Finding a principle is like cutting a master key from one lock. You study one experience to discover the mechanism beneath it, which allows you to carry the knowledge forward to open doors you haven’t even encountered yet.

To find those principles, it requires lived experience. Be like Montaigne, Leonardo, and many of the most influential thinkers who relentlessly practiced, studied, and learned.

Live your experiences. Find your Praxis.