These 15 Fun Life Experiments Will Teach You Skills, Create Confidence, And Change Your Life
We scoured the web for some of the most interesting self-experiments, and after sifting through hundreds, here are the 15 most inspiring ones that we found…
Author’s Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.
We’re in the middle of a fundamental revolution in how people improve their lives through experimentation.
In short: we now live in a world where anyone from anywhere can quickly learn from the world’s top experts for close to nothing. With affordable tools and trackers, it’s possible to rapidly test that advice to see what actually works. Finally, it’s now easy and free for people to document their stories and share it with millions of others around the world via social media.
As a result, more and more people are doing transformative life experiments, from conquering one fear a day, to learning a new skill rapidly, to even recovering their health when conventional medicine doesn’t work.
Whether you want to call it the Quantified Self movement, or Biohacking, Citizen Science, or simply Self-Experimentation, this personal experimentation revolution is transforming education, personal finance, health, dating, marriage, career growth, art, diet, lifestyle decisions, and much more.
We scoured the web for some of the most interesting self-experiments, and after sifting through hundreds, here are the 15 most inspiring ones that we found…
Want to create your own life-changing self-experiment now? I spent dozens of hours putting together this free mini-course to help you get started.
1. Intuit Employee Learns How To Draw A Freakishly Realistic Portrait In 30 Days
Max Deutsch, a product manager at Intuit, is mastering one new skill every month. His December goal was to draw a photorealistic portrait. Here’s the before and after:
2. Girl Learns How To Dance Like A Pro In a Year (TIME LAPSE)
Videographer Karen Cheng always wanted to learn how to dance, so she created a challenge for herself: become a great dancer in 365 days while documenting the transformation. The video shows her starting as an awkward dancer, practicing everywhere and every day, and eventually getting to a place where she can perform publicly. Her Day 365 video is truly inspiring!
Photo credit: Karen X. Cheng
3. Woman Does One Thing That Completely Scares Her Every Day For 100 Days
Michelle Poler decided to combat her fears head-on by creating ‘100 Days Of Fear.’ Some of her fear-busting experiments included performing at a stand-up comedy show, quitting her job, and walking around NYC wearing only a bikini.
4. Guy Plays Table Tennis Every Day for a Year (And Gets A Top 250 Ranking)
Sam Priestley practiced table tennis for a year with the support of a childhood friend / table tennis coach. See how good he got after starting from scratch.
5. Mother And Daughter Lose Weight Together (33kg / 74lbs in 100 Days)
The daughter, 19, suggested to the mother that they lose the weight—together. The mother-daughter duo decided to take on a 100-day challenge, and committed to filming ten seconds of their workouts and healthy eating for over three months.
6. Two Friends Travel To Four Countries To Learn Four Languages In One Year… Without Ever Speaking English
The challenge is to live in four countries, learn four languages and attempt to speak zero English for an entire year. Using Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Brazil, Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and Korean in Korea.
7. This 12-Year-Old Girl Mastered Dubstep Dancing By Just Using Youtube
In 7 months, this 12-year-old girl mastered dubstep dancing by just using YouTube. She watched, stopped, applied, and rewinded video clips of the best dubstep music dancers in the world until she mastered specific movements. Wow! I guess I don’t have an excuse to learn dancing now 🙂
