I recently watched a TedTalk video given by Max Hawkins, a guy who at one time lived a fairly rigidly structured life. Because he was a person of discipline, he meticulously scheduled his time, and by living according to this schedule, being in firm control, he came to feel he was living a bit with blinders on. His days were all largely regimented and the same. This routine also applied to how he used his free time.

To remedy the staticness of this streamlined life, he- a software engineer- decided to write a program that would, of all things, select a random event for him to attend each evening. And so he regimented into his life some randomness.

And by doing this, he found himself showing up at locations he had never visited to meet people he did not know to do things he had never considered doing.

And to his surprise, despite the awkwardness of some of them, he found himself enjoying the events, and getting out of his comfort zone.

He liked the randomization aspect of his experience so much that he left his employer and decided to take his engineering skills freelance- and to let another randomizer select places around the world for him to live every several months, which took him from San Francisco to Taiwan, to Mumbai, to Dubai, to Europe. And wherever he landed, he used his schedule randomizer to, again, direct him to events in his host city he would attend each night.

He lived in this way for several years, and the person who had been comfortable in living his limited, rigid, and tightly-scheduled daily regimens and patterns ended up getting to know people and customs and cities in various countries around the world.

Listening to him talk, I was intrigued with his approach to changing his life. While I did not feel compelled to write an event randomizing application, I respected his commitment to change his routine by throwing himself completely out of it- by experiencing new places, activities, and companions.

And I suppose sometimes, that is what it takes to make someone change their life- a plunge into the completely unfamiliar.

It is funny. At the end of his talk, he said he had had a nice and clean written conclusion to share about his experiences with his life experiment, but after some thought before he started speaking, he decided to trash it. He mused briefly about how our opportunities limit and in some was guide our choices in life, and he viewed some of our opportunities as products of the systems we are in- the networks of relationships we have based on our our work and our interests and our locale affiliations. And he concluded by not really concluding much.

But what his talk suggested to me was that we can change our opportunities if we change the stems that manage our thinking and being- and alter our participation in such systems.

Or, in other words, there is value in including some random in your weekly experience, to help “mix some things up” in your life.