Sanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

There’s this popular quote that’s frequently misattributed to Einstein:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I’d always believed in it. Applied it in work and life. Lived it. Coming from a design background, I embraced the iterative nature of design - the whole create, launch, get feedback, iterate loop of consistent refinement. It also appealed to my driven, can’t-sit-still personality. “It doesn’t work? OK next!” Impatience with actions, yes. In fact, sometimes too impatient, especially if I don’t let the actions have time to bear fruit, but it had generally served me well in the past.

Lately though, not so much. Nothing I do seems to be working.

And that’s killing my pride and sense of confidence. I always wondered, what’s changed? I’m mostly still me. Still as driven as before—in fact, more driven—just on different things.

Perhaps different things is the key here. In the past, I was in a more predictable environment. The school and workplace are mostly predictable. The goals are transparent, the rules are clear, and expectations explicit. Rewards follow effort in a cause and effect chain that’s easy to observe and track. Even when I went self-employed, the type of freelance projects I had were mostly in the same vein.

Yet now, in my transition to indie hacking and entrepreneurship, the game environment had flipped drastically. Things are more unpredictable. Chance shapes causation more than I give it. The best example is marketing on Twitter. The same tweet, sent out at different times, days or months, may have drastically different reception. One falls flat, while another goes viral. A few other such environments come to mind: product-market fit, overall entrepreneurial success, finding a cofounder.

“When chance plays a big role, the definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result” – @dvassallo

I think @dvassallo said it best, and his tweet was the catalyst to this mindblown moment of an epiphany I had about the role of chance in my indie hacking.

Doing the same thing over and over is insanity, yes, but only in predictable environments. Because the environmental inputs are always the same, so we can’t expect different outputs. That’s the caveat no one mentioned, ever.

But if you can never step into the same river twice, then that means you can expect a different ripple each time you step in, even though you are the same. The environmental inputs are always going to be different, even if your part of the input is the same, hence we can’t expect the same outputs.

So in stochastic environments, doing the same thing over and over is not insanity, but sanity.

So consistency won’t work in such environments. 1% compounding won’t work. Routine and rituals won’t work.

Read that again.

And again.

Burn it into your mind.

Caveat: You can still have consistent habits in your life, yet still take advantage of chance. Waking up at 5am every day has little bearing on your tweet going viral, because the operating environment is different. It only matters when your actions are in the same operating environment.