Generative learning is when you generate your own solutions to a problem or challenge, get feedback from reality, and learn from your mistakes.

This is similar to the evolutionary development model of software development, whereby you do some coding, play around with your app, and then evolve it some more.

Contrast this with learning solutions from other people. The limitation here is that other people’s solved problems probably don’t perfectly match your current problems.

When I was building my computer games business, I often came up short when trying to apply other people’s advice. They didn’t know my skills and talents. They didn’t know my concerns and limitations. Consequently, their advice would often land flat with me.

I had a similar experience when I was in a $30K per year business mastermind group in 2018. We’d do some masterminding sessions, and I’d often walk away with a collection of advice from other people that made little sense for my situation. People shared what worked for them, not what would work for me. What others advised usually didn’t align with my values, skills, customers, business model, or much else about my business. I often found it more practical to bounce ideas around with my wife.

It’s still nice to mastermind with other people, but not because their ready-made solutions will work. Masterminding is good for stimulating you to do your own experiments and explorations. I found it better for the vibe and the encouragement. The actual business advice was weak and misguided.

Where I tend to get the best results in life is from generative learning. It’s basically trial and error with a fancier name. As simple and effective as this is, people still don’t do enough of it.

It’s hard to come up with good business models that check all the boxes: lucrative, sustainable, personally fulfilling, purposeful, achievable, ambitious, fun, etc. If you apply someone else’s ready-made business model, you’ll probably feel some resistance in applying it to your own life. I think that’s because deep down, you know it’s a bit off. It’s a mismatch for you. Some people can do it, but you have to be really obedient, and many people just aren’t.

Someone else’s model can serve as a starting point for exploration, but there’s no substitute for doing the actual exploration work. Keep generating and testing your own solutions to problems.

When I look at advice on diet and nutrition, I can’t find anyone who teaches how I actually eat.

When I look at other people’s businesses, I can’t find anyone who teaches how to build and run a business like mine.

In all the relationship books I’ve read, I haven’t found any that describe how I relate to people.

I don’t know of anyone else teaching the philosophy of life that actually works for me.

There are lots of people teaching lifestyle design, but none of them teach the lifestyle that works for me.

I like being very organized, but I don’t do organizing like anyone else does. People sometimes ask me if I use some particular system. I can only do my system, not anyone else’s.

I sometimes pick up ideas from other people, but I haven’t allowed anyone to collect me as their protégé. My solutions were all arrived at through generative learning. I experimented till I found what works.

I’m actually pretty happy in my life these days. Even with the coronavirus situation, this has actually been an incredible year for me. One reason is that I’ve been moving quickly through my own forms of generative learning. For instance, the daily blogging serves as a new generative learning experience every day of the year, so my writing can evolve faster. Readers are telling me that I’m doing some of my best work ever this year, but I also think I’m doing some of my worst writing this year. I’m making more mistakes to learn faster.

If I try to directly apply what I’ve learned from other people, it always falls flat. I can’t get myself to do it. It’s always flawed. It’s always missing some key elements that would actually make it work for me.

But generative learning – good old trial and error – that’s been the most reliable path to finding solutions.

The “error” part sucks because who wants to fail? But if we can embrace the suckiness of that and know that it leads to more personalized, effective solutions, it’s easier to stomach it.

How are you personally responding to the coronavirus situation? Are you handling this situation as someone else taught you? Or are you finding your own way through this? I’ll bet you’ll get the best results by figuring out your own approach. Who else is capable to telling you how to intelligently reshape your life during these times? Only you can do that.

Let reality be the judge. Reality will show you whether your solutions are effective or not. If your solutions fall flat, accept that. I hate it when a solution that looks beautiful in the planning phase gets a failing grade from the real world. But I also know that it’s just feedback. It’s part of the learning process. And so I go back to the drawing board and try something else, just as optimistic as the previous time. I’m optimistic because I know that generative learning works in the long run.

What would happen if you embraced personal responsibility for generating your own solutions to life’s problems instead of trying to learn solutions from others? What if devising and testing solutions was 100% on you? What if no one would ever give you any advice? What if you couldn’t read or research to find any solutions?

How would you go about solving some of your problems, relying only on your existing knowledge and skills and good old trial and error? What if your only main problem solving tool was generative learning?

I’d bet that if you leaned more heavily on this tool, you could go faster. You’d stop waiting for other people to teach you things, and you’d come up with your own solutions. Some of your ideas won’t work, and you’ll learn from them. The more you explore and experiment, the sooner you’ll find what does work – for you.

Other people won’t solve your problems for you, but social support is still immensely valuable. Social support is good for generating ideas for experiments to do. It’s good for emotional encouragement. It’s good for pushing you to think bigger and to amp up your ambition. It’s good for pointing out shortcomings in your approaches. It’s good for opportunity abundance. But don’t regard other people as a pathways to fast and easy, ready-made solutions. You’re the ultimate problem solver in your life.

By the time I had started my computer games business in 1994, I had already programmed a commercially published game as an independent contractor working for a local game studio. Actually it was a four-pack of Windows 3.1 games that were sold as a single unit. And I’d worked on a previous game project before that, so in about six months, I had iterated through five unique game projects.

Each time I started a new game, I had the opportunity to improve upon what I’d done before. I’d begin with the code base for an earlier game project, and then I’d make some improvements to the code to create a stronger foundation for the next project.

Additionally, since I didn’t have to reinvent what I’d already done, I could stretch myself by taking on a little more challenge each time. For the first game project I worked on for the local studio, they already had a working prototype running on a Mac, and my job was to port it to Windows. They scrapped that project after a few weeks (for commercial reasons I believe), but the work was basically to translate some pre-existing code from one platform to another. This was my first commercial project ever, so it was great that it was an easy way to get started.

For the first game in the four-pack, however, there was no prototype. I had to code the game from scratch based on a pretty thin design doc (like 1-2 pages). I was assigned a young artist to work with, and that was the extent of our development team. It was a simple shoot-em-up game, so our tiny team was sufficient. I also had enough time to add some extra embellishments of my own, and I believe my improvements made the game a little more fun to play.

With each succeeding game project, I tried to challenge myself a little bit more. The more games I wrote, the more I could lean on previous code I’d already written, often adapting it for similar mechanics in a different game. The more code I could reuse, the more capacity I had for extra embellishments.

For the fourth game in the four-pack, I asked if I could design the game myself, and the company agreed. I kept to the minimalist standards of the four-pack, and I pushed myself to squeeze more out of the little 2D game engine I’d been developing.

By starting with a porting project, in a few iterations I was eventually able to design and code a complete game. I also did the sound effects for it.

But if I’d started with the fifth game project, it would have been too much. And it would have been discouraging too. It was so much nicer to see rapid progress through a series of completed projects, so by the time I was beginning the fifth project, my confidence was sky high. It was just another 20% beyond what I’d done before, so I knew it was achievable.

When I started my computer games business, I wrote a new code base for my first game, and it took about six solid months to develop that game because I put way more into it. Looking back, I think I overextended myself. I tried to squeeze too many new ideas into one project. It would have been better if I’d started with less ambitious project and released and iterated more frequently, like I’d done while working as a contractor. Trying to go too big too soon really slowed me down.

In fact, I made an even bigger mistake by progressing way too quickly into a mega-project that I worked on for years and had to be canceled in the end. Meanwhile, my business was starved of cashflow during that time because I had little to sell, and there was no effort being put into marketing. Going back to smaller projects with more frequent releases – and paying a lot more attention to marketing – turned things around.

Today I’m much better at leveraging the power of incremental improvements. I have a well-developed system that I use for developing and launching new courses. Each time I run through that system, I improve it. I document it more clearly. I add some new ideas, but not too many each run-through. I maintain the parts that are working, and this gives me more capacity to add a little more each time without feeling overwhelmed.

A recurring mistake I’ve made in the past was trying to add too many new ideas to a project. New ideas are way harder to incorporate than re-using previously tested ideas. For me the worst part about trying new ideas is that it’s hard to estimate how long they’ll take. The more new ideas I add to a project, the greater the risk of blowing my intended schedule.

When I’ve tried to overdo the new by incorporating too many new and untested ideas into a project, the project normally doesn’t go well. But when I assemble a project from pieces that are familiar and then add some newness on top of that, my odds of success increase greatly. And I feel more confident too.

Conscious Growth Club is a good example. When I started putting together the initial pieces for this club in 2017, the overall package was new, but I assembled it from pieces rooted in past experience, so it wasn’t overwhelming. I stuck to the core ideas first, and then gradually year by year, we’re adding more to it.

I think of each year in CGC like a new project that builds upon the codebase of the previous year. We maintain what’s working and then explore adding something new – a new feature, a new course, some new experiments, etc. The key is not to try adding too many new ideas all at once, especially if they’re complex ideas.

Consider the CGC member discussion forums. I knew I could manage that because I’d done it before. I’d previously admin’d a sizable public forum for five years, and I had a lot of previous admin and online community experience from years prior. So while we were using new software for the CGC forums, online community management is old hat to me. I was very confident that I could manage that aspect successfully, and I had the necessary mental callouses to prepare me for the experience in a realistic way.

The courses were going to be new, and that part took the longest, but I’d previously had experience with writing (from blogging and a book), product design (from my game development experience), audio (from podcasting), speaking (from six years in Toastmasters), online publishing, and marketing and selling products online. So I had a whole bundle of experiences that gave me a solid codebase to build upon. There was still a lot of newness here, but it wasn’t as daunting as starting from scratch.

For the CGC coaching calls, I had previous one-on-one coaching experience, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to expand into group coaching calls. It’s basically a series of one-on-one coaching sessions back to back.

Wherever I need to chip away at some of the new areas, I leaned in with practice. My video practice was a bit weak, so I committed to doing a public 30-day challenge to record and publish a new YouTube video each day. I averaged about 30 minutes per day, so that was 15 hours of published video in a month. That gave me sufficient practice to get comfortable with it. I also bought Final Cut Pro and learned it use it for video editing till I grew very comfortable with it. I spent weeks transforming a room of my house into an audio and video recording studio as well. I’ve been using it for years now, but it took a long time to experiment with the lighting and setup till I liked the results.

It was just so crucial to assemble the different parts of CGC from the familiar and not try to squeeze in too many new ideas all at once. Figuring out the new parts always takes longer, but when you do figure them out, you can lock them into your codebase and reuse them efficiently.

Additionally I had to figure out how to launch and promote CGC. I started out very basic. And now each year that we launch, I can do things with a bit more complexity, including advertising. The familiar gets easier, and that frees up capacity to try some new things. I like to incorporate at least one new idea each launch, but if I try to add three or four new ideas, it could become overwhelming to get everything done in time.

Exploring what’s new can be fun and rewarding, but it’s also risky. I’ve paid the price numerous time for trying to be too ambitious with too many new ideas. Every new idea takes a lot of work to figure out, and it’s unpredictable how long it will take precisely because it’s new. A project that tries to incorporate too many new ideas is at great risk of scope creep. If scope creep becomes too much, a project could be at risk of cancellation, or it may begin to feel like a death march.

Think about where it’s important to innovate with a project and where it isn’t. If you want to innovate greatly with the content, it’s probably best to keep the format familiar. If you want to innovate greatly with the format, then you may not innovate as much with the content. If you want to innovate on both sides, look for ways to lean on a tried and tested codebase where possible, so excessive newness doesn’t overburden your project with too much risk.

Exploring the new can be fun and rewarding, but pay attention to the risks. If you’re constantly blowing your intended schedules and dropping projects before they finish, consider whether you’re trying to do too much too soon. Could you scale back to a more reasonable project that can better leverage your existing codebase of knowledge and skills, even if it’s less creative? It’s better to start with a modest success and build upon it with each new iteration than to overwhelm yourself from the start.