Exploring vs Exploiting: My Potbelly’s Experience

During college, I routinely walked by a Potbelly’s sandwich shop on the way to class. Back then, I saw it as a place for sororities girls and other random people. For 22yo me, an average meal would have been a tragedy. Potbelly’s seemed like a wildcard. So I usually passed by it thinking a potential subpar meal wasn’t worth the risk.

Then one day, maybe a month shy of graduating, I decided to try it. It was right there. I was hungry. I figured “What the hell, let’s try something new”.

Not knowing what to order, I asked an employee what they’d get. He suggested “A Wreck on multi-grain”. Fair enough. He whipped up the sandwich and sent it through their special conveyor-belt oven (which adds to the experience). The multigrain-meat-cheese toasted fusion that emerged was mouthwatering. They then balanced out the thing 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.

...You mean to tell me that I could have been stuffing myself with Wrecks this whole time?…How many had I unwittingly foregone during my college years? And in one short month, I’d start work 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? It couldn’t have been a major mistake in my decision-making process because my then current method for selecting restaurants actually worked really well, but still, something was missing.

Numbers Games and Kissing Toads

Later in life, I came across this idea that captures 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 hindered exploration—leading to missed opportunities. What I didn’t know was costing me.

But the real story here isn’t the Epicurean drive of my 20s; it’s my former decision-making strategy that kept my world small. In the fullness if time, I came to understand that it could be self-defeating to choose my most-favored restaurants all too often. My low variation strategy killed exploration, and I was none the wiser.

Fast forward to today. I try to be more mindful of realizing decision-making is not always about a-bird-in-the-hand certainty. Some games are numbers games, where the winners ultimately pay for the losers. In the case of food selection, I needed to explore more often—instead of merely exploiting the same spots over and over again.

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 understand that avoiding toads is not always the best long-term strategy. What I’m getting at is you should explore your environment more— mix in experiments (e.g. trying new places, investing strategies, diets, exercise routines, etc) to occasionally verify that you’re not unknowingly stuck at a local maximum. You might just fine a few more winners along your journey than you otherwise would

Conclusion

You should mix in a bit of exploration into everyday life to avoid getting stuck at local maximums. Think about where you might be under-exploring in life, whether it be in restaurants, work, personal life, social life, health items, etc. And yes, you’ll have to kiss a few toads along the way. But I think you should accept that and move forward.

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.