All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The meaning of the quote
On November 26, 1842, a 39-year-old writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson sat down with his journal and told himself to stop playing it so safe. This quote shows up almost as an aside in that pep talk, tucked between a warning not to be too timid and squeamish and a promise that once you’ve been knocked down and gotten back up, a stumble stops being scary.
That’s the whole idea packed into one line. Life isn’t something you get right by planning harder. It’s something you get right by trying more things and letting most of them fail. Nobody bats .800 on the first swing at anything, and Emerson wasn’t asking you to. He was asking you to swing more often.
In the book Fail Fast, Fail Often, psychologists Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz studied people who landed in careers they loved and found barely any of them got there with a five-year plan. Most got there by saying yes to a random project, a weekend class or a favor for a friend, then paying attention to which ones they didn’t want to stop doing.
That’s close to what psychologists call a growth mindset, treating your skills as something you’re still building instead of a fixed score you have to protect. An experiment you can walk away from teaches you something either way. A plan you have to protect just needs to be right, and that’s a much heavier thing to carry around.
There’s also a decent case that people who let themselves take more small risks end up more satisfied with their lives than people who play it safe, though that’s more of an interesting pattern researchers keep bumping into than a settled law of happiness.
Emerson wanted busyness, not recklessness.
Action steps
None of this works if it stays a nice idea, so here’s how to turn one ordinary week into a few real experiments.
- Pick one thing you’ve been overthinking. Not the big, scary, life-altering decision. The small one you’ve turned over in your head a dozen times without touching it, like pitching the idea or finally sending that message.
- Give it a deadline you can count in days. A month-long deadline leaves room for doubt to creep back in.
Forty-eight hours doesn’t. - Keep score on attempts, not outcomes. Write down what you tried each week, not just what worked.
A list full of misses is proof you’re running experiments instead of just hoping.
Pick one tonight. You don’t need the results yet, only the try.
About the author
Ralph Waldo Emerson was 8 years old when his father died and left the family broke, and he and his brother Edward shared a single overcoat that whole winter, taking turns wearing it to school.
College didn’t make him look any more promising. At Harvard he came out an average student who admitted he was a hopeless dunce at math, and after graduating he took a teaching job he didn’t want, mostly because his mother needed the money.
Next came the pulpit, and that lasted only a few years before he resigned over a fight about how to serve Communion, a stance that cost him a steady income and looked, to his neighbors, like one more thing Emerson couldn’t stick with.
Two years later his young wife Ellen died of tuberculosis, and grief nearly finished what Harvard and the church hadn’t. A recovery trip to Europe the next year put him in rooms with Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and something about those conversations reset how he thought about his own writing.
Back home, a lecture series he gave in the mid-1830s on English writers took off, and by 1837 his Phi Beta Kappa speech, “The American Scholar,” was being called America’s intellectual declaration of independence. The man who couldn’t hold a pulpit had finally found the platform that fit him.
Emerson went on to write essays like Self-Reliance and Nature that shaped Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and he’s still called the father of American Transcendentalism, though he never fully shook his practical side. His poems sold so poorly in England that he joked his cranberry bog back in Concord turned a better profit than his verse.
This quote comes from one of Emerson’s private journals, written in 1842 while he was deep into the lecture and essay career that made him famous. It reads less like a philosopher’s proof and more like a man reminding himself, in his own handwriting, not to lose his nerve.
Resources
- Fail Fast, Fail Often (Book)
- Designing Your Life (Book)
- Fixed vs. Growth Mindset (Article)
- Happiness Is Risky Business (Article)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Wikipedia)
- Emerson’s journal entry on experiments (Article)
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