In this vlog, I want to talk about the standard deviation of life experiences. This follows on from a vlog I released recently called “Meaning Making.” It was about crafting your life to turn tragedies into triumphs—finding meaning in whatever comes your way. If you can do that, nothing in your life will ever be wasted.

This is not to say you can’t grieve when bad things happen. But in my own life, after hitting bottom with drug addiction and prostitution, I had to learn how to make meaning and truly own my experiences.

Making Meaning Is About Stretching and Growing

The follow-up to that is simple: experience more. Stretch. Grow. Throw yourself out into the world. I love the statistic showing that people on their deathbed most often regret what they didn’t try, not what they did.

I want to live my life having had a lot of experiences, even if the average positivity of them was lower because I climbed out on some skinny branches. To me, that’s better than having lived a life where I didn’t take risks and always did the “right thing.” Doing that might raise the average positivity of my life, but there would be far less variation and variety.

Understanding the Standard Deviation of a Life

Standard deviation is a measurement of how much variability there is in a sample. Here’s an example: If you have a group of 1,000 people who are, on average, 5’ 8” tall, but everyone in the sample is either 5’ 7”, 5’ 8, or 5’ 9”, there’s not that much standard deviation, not much variety.

If the sample features a lot of variation, however, there may be people ranging from 5’1” to 6’8”, and all the heights in between. The average could still be 5’ 8”, but the standard deviation is higher.

I prefer a life with a high standard deviation, even if that means there are more lows, as long as I get to have a greater variety of experiences. This is because I know I can take those crappy experiences and make meaning out of them, turning them to good account through lessons learned and wisdom gleaned.

Sometimes, It Pays to Stand at the Edge and Look Over

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Sheilla Torkelson, at Sunshine Mesa in Colorado. A year or two after I hit bottom with drugs and got clean and sober, I went back to Sunshine Mesa to visit David and Sheilla. I was sitting with Sheilla in a little café one day, feeling kind of down and ashamed about how far off the rails my life had gone. She wasn’t concerned about the path I’d taken. She told me that maybe this was exactly what I needed to do. Some people, she told me, “need to step out onto the white hot tip of life, and look over the edge, just to see what’s there. You’ve always been one of those people.”

That stayed deeply with me. I still do that, sometimes. I need to go look over the edge. Sometimes it’s not the best, but sometimes it’s incredible. And either way, I learn.

So I encourage you to try more. Don’t hold yourself back. The part of us that holds us back and is afraid of failure is trying to protect us. But it’s a young, fear-based part of us that doesn’t need to be running the show. It may think that we won’t respect ourselves if we fail, and neither will others.

But that’s not the case. When we watch someone go all-out, but then fail, we respect them. We know what it takes to go all out. When someone gives it their all, we think the world of them.

For example, imagine you know someone who trains ceaselessly for the Olympics. They train so hard and you watch them do it. They go to the Olympics, but they don’t win a medal. They may come home despondent, but do you think badly of them? NO! You think they’re amazing. You watched them pour their heart into a worthy pursuit. What bravery! What badassery!

Risk Leads to Respect

When we watch ourselves risk and experiment and try new things, we respect that. If we’ve risked, we respect that. We generally don’t respect people who play it safe all the time.

So why not stretch and try new things? There may be risk, but it’s okay to fail. What matters is really trying and seeing what happens—and then becoming someone who makes meaning out of it, whether it goes well or not.

I’m a big fan of having a high standard deviation in your life. It’s what I do myself. Be someone who experiences more. You’ll respect the hell out of yourself. And that means a lot.