The Difference Between Experimenting and Tinkering (with Patrick Rhone)

I spoke at Podcast Movement in New York last month, and the whole conference ran on headphones — every attendee wearing a set, switching channels to pick which stage they were listening to. Which meant that partway through my talk, I watched at least one person in front of me switch to somebody else. It was a bold format. I'm still not sure it worked. But it was a real experiment, and I came away thinking about how rarely we name the experiments we're already running.

Patrick Rhone and I spent this month's PM Talks on that — including a distinction I think matters more than it sounds like it should. Experiments have an end in mind. Tinkering doesn't. One of them produces a decision; the other produces the feeling of progress without ever asking you to make one. We also got into Patrick's unrecorded podcast, which got him mocked by some fairly prominent people at the time and then quietly became the thing everybody does now.

Six Discussion Points

• Most of the choices you make in a day are experiments you never labelled as such — you're acting without knowing the outcome, which is the definition, whether or not you framed it that way.
• The difference between experimentation and tinkering is an endpoint: an experiment asks a question you intend to answer and then stop, while tinkering is perpetual adjustment that feels productive precisely because it never resolves.
• Parameters make an experiment possible rather than constraining it — knowing what you can't control is what tells you what's actually worth testing.
• You cannot predict which thing will land; after thirty years of writing online, the most-linked post of Patrick's career came from a car conversation with his wife and took twenty seconds to write.
• Coming home from a conference with pages of notes almost guarantees nothing happens — picking exactly three (one thing to act on, one person to connect with, one thing to think about) lets the rest fall away without festering.
• Stopping is itself an experiment: quitting something at its peak asks a real question about what you'd do with the time and how you'd fill the gap, and you genuinely don't know the answer going in.

Three(ish) Connection Points

Between us we promised rather more than three of these on air, so here they all are. Consider the overrun an experiment.

• Patrick Rhone — and his NOW page, which he swears he updates every couple of weeks
• Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Fish: a tap essay by Robin Sloan — the one he lost the source code to and rebuilt from scratch
• Microsoft's Biggest Miss — Patrick's most-linked post, written in about twenty seconds, based on something his wife said in the car
• What You Bring Home — my piece on the three picks, which is where this conversation started
• My NOW page
• The poem Matt wrote about my talk — handed to me on orange card stock when I went back for my laptop

The three-picks idea came out of my own notebook after New York, and I wrote about it thinking it was a minor observation. It got more response than most things I publish, which rather proves the other half of this conversation — you don't get to choose what resonates. You only get to choose what you try. So: what have you been tinkering with that you could turn into an actual experiment, with an end date and a decision attached?