Exploring vs Exploiting: My Potbelly’s Experience
During college, I often passed by a Potbelly’s sandwich shop on my way to class. At the time, I thought it a place for sororities girls and other people. The decorum didn’t speak to me; my friends weren’t demanding I try it. Back then, an average meal was tragic. Potbelly’s wasn’t worth the risk. So the thinking went…
One day maybe a month shy of graduating, the stars and the moon aligned for a Potbelly’s excursion. It was right there. I was hungry. I figured “What the hell, let’s explore”. Time to cross the threshold.
Not knowing what to order, I asked an employee what they’d get; they suggested “A Wreck on multi-grain”. Fair enough. They then whipped one up and sent it through their special conveyor-belt oven (which adds to the experience); the multigrain-meat-cheese toasted fusion that emerged spoke to me. They balanced out the sandwich by adding the remaining toppings and rang me up.
I grabbed a table, sat down and unwrapped the sandwich—moment of truth!
IT. WAS. DELICIOUS.
...I could have been stuffing myself with Wrecks this whole time?…How many had I unwittingly foregone? And in one short month, I’d start a my job in a city that didn’t have a Potbelly’s. I wondered how many times I could visit Potbelly’s before I left.
This event triggered some light soul searching. Potbelly’s was clearly a winner. But why hadn’t I tried it sooner? What mistake had I been making? After all, my then current method for selecting restaurants actually worked really well, but something was missing.
Numbers Games and Kissing Toads
Later in life, I came across this idea that incapsulated my mistake: risk is both the potential for losses, BUT ALSO, gains foregone. While my original strategy had led to many satisfied meals and thus minimized “losses”, the strategy’s low variance nature came with an unfortunate byproduct—missed opportunities. I hadn’t fully appreciated “what I didn’t know”.
Though the real story here isn’t the Epicurean drive of my youth; it’s my former strategy. In the fullness if time, I came to understand that it could be self-defeating to choose my most-favored restaurants all too often. The low variation strategy meant my world of food stayed small, and I was none the wiser. I was stuck at a local maximum, not a global one.
Fast forward to today; it’s not always about a-bird-in-the-hand certainty. I recognize some games are numbers games, where the winners ultimately pay for the losers. In this case, I needed to explore more often—instead of merely exploiting the same fishing holes.
College me was trying to minimize the number of toads I kissed along the way, which made sense to me at the time, but now I realize even that’s not always the best long-term strategy. Said differently, you should explore your environment more and mix in experiments (e.g. trying new places, strategies or things) to occasionally verify that you’re not unwittingly stuck at a local maximum.
Conclusion
Sometimes exploration needs to be mixed a bit more heavily into everyday life if you’re to find your global maximum. I’m sure there are mathematical ways to represent an ideal ratio of exploring what you don’t know vs exploiting what you have, but that’s not in my wheelhouse.
The main point is that you should be mindful of where you might be under-exploring in life, whether it be in restaurants, work, personal life, etc. To uncover better, you may need to get used to kissing a few toads along the way.
Author’s Note:
Nietzsche paraphrased: There are those who prefer a handful of certainty to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities.
Examples of exploring instead of exploiting:
Going to different restaurants or ordering something different off the menu.
Ordering 3 different blends of coffee when you only need one to more quickly find your favorite.
Low cost Amazon purchases (like ordering 3 types of hearing protection at once and testing each one, instead of merely 1).
Changing up your workout routine.
Trying different vendors at work who have potentially valuable offerings.
Testing different genres on Netflix.
Exploring Youtube for instructional videos on a subject you’re already familiar with.