Joel Greenblatt, an investor who once compounded money at roughly 50% a year for a decade, brought a jar containing 1,776 jelly beans into a classroom.

He asked a group of students to estimate how many were inside and write their answers privately on index cards.

The average guess was 1,771.

Then he asked them to do it again. This time, they gave their answers out loud, one by one. They could keep their original estimate or change it, but now they could hear what everyone else thought.

The average fell to 850.

Nothing had changed. It was the same jar, the same question, and the same people taking a guess. The only thing that changed was that everyone could hear everyone else.

When they thought independently, the group was off by less than 1%. Once they could hear everyone else's answers, they were off by more than 50%. People changed estimates that had been closer to the truth after hearing what everyone else thought.

Greenblatt used the experiment to explain investing, but it made me wonder what happens when we do the same thing with our lives.

How much of what you want did you decide for yourself?

By the time you ask yourself what you want, you've already heard thousands of answers. You know what your parents think. You know what your friends chose. You know what people like you are supposed to do. You know what gets rewarded, what sounds impressive, what looks like success and what will be easiest to explain when someone asks what you're doing with your life.

Eventually, it becomes difficult to tell where their answers end and yours begin.

The quickest way to misery is succeeding in a life built on the foundation of being understood by others.

If you've got everything you wanted and still found yourself wondering, “Is this it?”, I have a strong guess as to what happened and how to fix it for good.

You wanted your life to make sense to other people. You wanted your decisions understood. So you explained yourself, asked for advice, looked for agreement, and paid attention to what was rewarded.

Eventually, without realizing it, you started making decisions that were easier to explain.

And now your life depends on an impossible standard: being fully understood by someone who isn't you.

I call this an impossible standard, because even the people closest to you can never fully understand you. They haven't lived your first-person timeline. They weren't there for every experience, every conversation, every mistake, and every strange interest or moment that changed the way you see the world.

They can love you deeply and still only know your life from the outside.

So why would you build it around their understanding of it?

My life changed drastically when I started using writing to understand myself instead of trying to be understood.

I take a question and wrestle with it on paper. I make an argument, disagree with myself, find the contradiction, change my mind and keep going until I reach a conclusion I can trace back through my own life. The point is to find out what I actually think.

Give a thousand people the same question and you would expect a thousand different essays. They've lived a thousand different lives, accumulated different evidence and noticed different things.

Yet look around. We're consuming the same books, podcasts, posts and opinions, then repeating the same conclusions back to each other. And then we wonder why we end up in perfectly good lives that feel like they don't fit, even when we succeed.

So the practice is very simple: stop beginning with other people's answers.

Start with a question instead. Sit with it long enough to discover what your own experience has to say about it. Make the argument. Test it. Find where it breaks. Change your mind. Follow it somewhere you didn't expect to go.

Your memories, mistakes, desires, contradictions, obsessions, relationships and everything you've experienced give you material nobody else has access to in the same combination. The more you learn to think from that material, the less you need to borrow conclusions about what matters, what you want, or how you should live.

You stop asking other people to make sense of your life because you're finally making sense of it yourself. Some of them won't understand where you end up. I think that's the point.

Over 400 years ago, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne called his writings essais: attempts. Trials. A way of using writing to examine a question without pretending you already know where you'll end up.

I want to bring the practice back to life.

So I've built something called Les Essais.

And I've decided to make it something we do together.

Once a month, I'll publish one of my own attempts and send it to you on paper. At the end will be the question for the next issue. From there, we all get the same thirty days to think about it, wrestle with it, write, change our minds and see where our own lives take us.

This will not be published online. Montaigne worked these ideas out by hand and people encountered them on paper. Four hundred years later, I think there's something worth recovering in that. A question removed from the feed, from the comments, from everyone else's immediate opinion. Something you can physically hold, disappear with for a while, write all over, and answer before hearing everyone else's answer.

One question. One essay. Thirty days to find out what you think.

I've been practicing it for a while now and it has become one of the most valuable ways I've found to think. So I decided to keep going, once a month, and put the result on paper.

The first one started with a word I thought I understood: Cheating.

I didn't look up what it meant. I started with cases. I wrote down what I thought, found situations where my reasoning stopped working, changed it, broke that too, and kept going. Only when I had exhausted my own thinking did I look at the definitions other people had written.

One word turned into 22 pages.

That's what I find so fascinating about this. We spend so much of our lives looking for answers when there is enormous value in finding out what happens when you don't give yourself one.

The first Les Essais ships in October.

If you want to practice thinking for yourself until it starts changing the way you live, come do this with me.

Reply to this email and I'll tell you how to be part of it.

Then we'll start on the next question together.

Stay smart,

Benoit