The Curiosity Experiment
Before you quit your job, try this.
Hi, I’m Saachi!
If your life and the tasks in it feel like a chore (as they do for me at times), you’ve forgotten the point.
We think we should do things to control the outcome. But when we do what lights us up, outcomes organize around us.
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Do your mornings feel heavy?
You have to get up, show up, and perform again. Pretend to care about things that stopped meaning anything to you a long time ago.
Part of you doesn’t want to. But the bills are real, so you suck it up and you go.
You tell yourself it’s worth it for the weekend, the vacation, the little pleasures the paycheck buys. For a while, that justification worked. Lately, it isn’t working…
I lived in that for years. Until the day it all came out of me at once, in a one on one with my boss, the tears just exploding out for no reason I could name.
Nothing was wrong. And yet everything in me was saying something was very wrong.
That feeling has a name. It’s called misalignment.
It’s what happens when you force yourself to do something for reasons that have nothing to do with actually wanting to.
And it’s not fear.
Fear is when you want something, push through the nerves, and feel alive on the other side. Misalignment is the opposite. You force yourself to show up, and even after, you still feel terrible.
Does that sound like where you are right now?
The only exit you can see
So you’re exhausted from forcing it. And the only way out your mind offers is to quit. Walk away. Go do something completely different.
But that feels enormous.
What would I even do instead?
How would I know it would work?
What about the money holding my whole life together?
So you don’t move. You stay stuck, telling yourself this is just how life is.
It might not be the job
I know, because I picked the dramatic door myself.
Right after that day with my boss, I quit. Then I threw myself into one venture after another, thinking the missing piece was passion.
If I was truly passionate about it, I’d make it work. Each one felt exciting for a while. And each one, in time, left me feeling exactly the way I had in the job I walked away from.
The heaviness had followed me everywhere.
That’s when I realized, maybe it wasn’t the job, but something I was doing in all of them.
Here’s the tell. If you once loved this job before it slowly turned into a chore, the job probably isn’t the issue.
For me, it wasn’t the job. It was the way I was showing up in it.
(Sometimes quitting really is the aligned move, when something real has been calling you and you’ve buried it because the job feels safer. If that’s you, you already feel it. But many times, quitting feels like the only option when the truth is we don’t know what other options are there)
So how was I showing up at the job?
Think about how you actually spend your days at work.
Present it this way. Soften your opinion so it gets approved. Sound smart in the meeting.
Take on projects that bolster your case for a promotion. Run the same process everyone runs: benchmark, pull the best practices, optimize, repeat.
That constant performing, doing all of it to control the outcome, is the misalignment.
And underneath it is a voice you’ve been talking over for years. Call it curiosity. Call it intuition.
It’s the pull that tells you what you’re drawn to, the thing that gives you those little tingles when something truly interests you.
It’s those creative ideas that show up at work, the ones we shut down the moment they appear because they don’t sound logical enough, or because we’re scared they’ll make us look dumb.
When you ignore that voice and perform for the outcome, work feels like a chore.
Follow it instead, and the very same work starts to feel alive.
A new angle on a campaign. An idea out of nowhere. A spark you actually want to chase.
This is the whole shift.
You don’t have to quit to feel that. You just have to start listening.
Now you might be wondering: if these ideas seem illogical, or might make me look dumb, how am I ever supposed to act on them?
Intuition feels illogical because your rational mind can’t see the whole picture. It catches connections your logic misses. That’s exactly why trusting it feels risky at first. But put it into practice, and you start to see doors opening… illogically :) More on this in next week’s newsletter!
This week, you don’t have to act on anything at all. You just have to start listening.
7 Days of Curiosity
So before we meet again next week, I want you to try an easy experiment. It’s the simplest way I’ve found to start hearing your intuition again.
Open a new note on your phone notes app. Or if you like writing with pen and paper, keep a small pocket notebook.
Every morning, write today’s date. This quick action helps you remember the experiment daily.
For the next 7 days, write down every idea or thought your brain throws at you, however random or wild or dumb it seems.
The sudden urge to understand photosynthesis. An ad that caught you for a reason you can’t name.
Don’t make any of it connect to your job or your goals. Just catch it as it comes.
One rule: no commentary.
No “this is pointless,” no “that would never work.” You’re a journalist on assignment. So record, don’t judge.
This is a record of creative thoughts and ideas that come to you without the imminent judgement or commentary that follows.
Because those out-of-nowhere ideas are a way of how your intuition speaks to you.
A few real captures from mine, exactly as messy as they came:
Capsule wardrobe, how to dress well without thinking about it. Follow LT on YouTube.
The difference between misalignment and fear. How do you actually tell them apart? Go through old journal entries.
Look up photosynthesis and that quantum possibilities experiment. So cool.
That ad concept I came across yesterday on Instagram, could any of it work for this startup?
Read Sugarman’s book on advertising. Old school, all about psychology.
Richard Claremont’s intuitive painting course. Art sounds exciting to me for the first time! Buy it and try it.
Check out Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks!
Do it for seven days. Just capture. Then read them back the same way you collected them, as the journalist, with no judgment.
This week is only about listening. The whole point is to let that inner voice speak freely again, without getting shunned the moment it does.
The more we let it speak, the stronger it grows. And slowly, it comes back into command.
That’s how we start living to our highest potential, joyfully and vibrantly, in every moment.
Next week, we take this experiment a bit further, and we start following our intuition.
You might be stunned by how much spark is hiding in the exact place that’s felt like a chore.
So, are you starting this week?
All you need is a note open on your phone and an open mind.
Comment below so I can follow your journey! I’ll be right here walking it with you. See you next week! :)