Moving my life to San Francisco without an “in.” Traveling 30+ countries solo as an early content creator. Building a 0-1 marketplace across 75 countries. Scaling some of the world’s most beloved creative tools. Getting engaged to the love of my life in St. Tropez.

These are highlight reel moments - outputs.

What doesn’t usually make the stage - the inputs. Learning to name where we’re playing small, when to say no, when all-in is the whole point vs. a distraction. Recalibrating, more times than felt comfortable.

The inputs are what happen in between.

The seed that sprouted most of these seasons was something to the effect of “let’s just try it” and a whole lot of intention. Wow - does “let’s just try it” compound.

Before I had product language for roadmaps, I have long looked at decision making through the lens of experimentation.

It takes the edge off, for me. Lowers the risk threshold.

You make an informed decision, and if it doesn’t work out, you can just… iterate, learn from empirical data, and then repeat.

I am a data and systems gal at heart. There is so much peace in empirical data (and by counter, can be so much unnecessary anxiety in long, drawn out “what if” cycles.)

Introduction to the Wheel of Life

So perhaps inevitably, as I sat with my then-executive-now-life coach for the first time 10 years ago, when I set out to talk about startup trials and she rerouted me to ask about my stress levels and handed me the Wheel of Life, I was immediately hooked.

In one hour this tool excavated in clear, empirical, measurable, visualized data, exactly where my life was thriving, and exactly where I had… opportunities.

We can tend to think of “average” as a bad thing, striving always to be the outlier.

But in the Wheel of Life, a well-rounded average offers resilience.

Moving every area at once isn’t realistic. Over time, spokes that jet out a lot more than others cause wobble. And it can be all too easy to go through the motions and demands of day-to-day without reflecting on - or even noticing - any of this.

Since then, the wheel has become a cornerstone of my years, my most forwarded email, and the start of many of my favorite rituals and conversations.

The fuller my days became at work, the more clearly I saw the wheel the exact same way as my growth roadmaps: a benchmarking tool for experiments.

Gather the data. Find the highest points of leverage. Remove what constricts. Optimize what expands. Document your learnings. And have fun doing it.

The Life by Experiment Toolkit

Life by Experiment is a toolkit built of that same method, pointed at our ultimate product: life.

As I’ve been watching the digital creative space evolve over the last year, unlocking so much new access to - just build things - at our fingertips, I’ve wanted back in the arena as an individual creator. In a way that’s sustainable and energizing, builds real community, and fits in the margins of my time.

When the spark for digital toolkits around the wheel arrived, this Substack, and the first round of tools - Wheel of Life, Quarterly Recalibration Kit, Systems Library - practically poured out of me.

The energy surge was immediate and palpable. Creative expression is a compounding variable.

I’ve learned to trust this pull, so for the next year at least I am committed to writing here weekly, continuing to build out digital tools for this community, and seeing where this takes us all. Getting to be a beginner creator again, in this new world? Genuinely fun.

The power of what we can just build today is incredible, and my mission here is to help you put some of those capabilities to work on the greatest product you’ll ever have: life.

My favorite parts of this will be where you respond and share a system, prompt, habit or otherwise you use to improve your life that I, and our community, can learn from in the chat.

Filling your own cup overflows to everything around you.

If this is the kind of thinking you want in your inbox, be sure to hit subscribe. I’m here weekly for at least the next year. (You’ll get the wheel immediately too.)

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Ready to share an experiment you’ve run that unlocked a highlight reel? Tell us in The Lab or comments.

–christina leigh

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