No matter what your goal is in 2024, you’ll need to know this

The surprising findings from the swimming rats experiment?

Hi, and welcome to 2024!

I don’t know about you, but I had an amazing end of the year by (almost) completely, shamelessly, guilt-free disconnecting myself from work.

I enjoyed about 2 weeks in Tenerife, a warm island in the Atlantic Ocean.?

Spanish culture, many Brits, a ton of sports pubs, amazing views, and spectacular beaches.?

Loved it, as you can read on my face: this picture was taken after we saw 7 orcas and dozens of dolphins swimming near our boat.

Anyway, enough about this.?

The fact is that you need to get some rest, stop, and smell the roses every now and then.?

So, if your goal is to make 2024 an amazing year, you have to take into account this obvious ingredient:

HOPE.

Yes, hope is not a strategy, but your strategy for 2024 should definitely include hope.

I’ve beaten myself up for decades, and I can tell from experience that hope allowed me to make things happen.?

It’s the mental switch in your brain, your attitude towards what you have to accomplish, that moves things.

If you change how you look at things, the things you look at change.

Here’s what the evidence shows:

The swimming rats experiment

In 1957, Dr. Curt Richter, a Harvard alumnus and esteemed professor at Johns Hopkins University, made an experiment encapsulated in his seminal paper, "On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man," published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine.?

This investigation sought to delve deeper into a query posed by Walter Cannon in 1942 concerning the lethal impact of persistent fear.

The first Experiment

Richter's initial experiment revolved around a critical question: How long would domesticated rats strive for survival in a seemingly hopeless scenario??

To explore this, he placed twelve rats in jars half-filled with water.?

Rats, known swimmers, faced an environment of slippery glass walls, leading to the drowning of three rats within two minutes due to a rapid drop in heart rate.

The remaining nine persisted, treading water for 40-60 hours before succumbing to exhaustion.?

The Second Experiment

In contrast, a subsequent test with 34 wild rats, which were naturally more robust and adapted to harsh environments, yielded surprising results.?

The terror of human handling caused several of these rats to die from cardiac arrest before even touching the water.?

Those that did enter the water showed no fight or flight response and perished within 1-15 minutes

The Final Experiment

Richter's next phase introduced a pivotal element: hope.?

He repeated the experiment with a larger group of rats, rescuing them as they neared surrender, drying them, and then reintroducing them to the water.?

This intervention led to a remarkable increase in survival time, with rats swimming for 60-80 hours.

Yes, Richter's methods are inhumane (by today's standards), but they reveal profound insights.?

The domesticated rats, accustomed to human interaction, swam longer, perhaps holding onto the possibility of external rescue.?

The wild rats, lacking such expectations, quickly accepted their fate.?

However, once hope was demonstrated as a viable outcome, all rats exhibited a heightened will to live, underlining hope's powerful role in driving perseverance and resilience, even in the simplest of minds.

That being said, I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of 2024 with 5 ideas:

1. Consciously build hope. In yourself and in the ones around you.?

If you’re a manager, that’s basically what your job is all about.

1. If you’re in the CRO/experimentation world, show a first win pretty quickly (even if it is small) to make the team hope that wins are possible.
2. Carve out time to rejuvenate and enjoy what you are and what you have accomplished so far. It was eye-opening for me how far in the weeds I was before this vacation. Distance helps you distinguish what needs to be done from what’s simply nice to have.
3. Be grateful. For me, the word for 2024 is “Gratitude”. In fact, research shows that something as simple as writing down 5 things you’re grateful for once a week for 8 weeks in a row can boost your happiness by as much as 25%!
4. Live 2024 with an experimentation mindset. Iterate continuously. If you have a winning experiment, that’s great. If you don’t win, don’t learn, and stop experimenting, that’s losing.?

And, of course, if you’re after ways to improve your conversion rates, learn more about your customers, or improve customer lifetime value, there’s Omniconvert for that!?

PS: we’re cooking a fantastic partnership program: if you’re with an agency, drop me a message!?