Sharpen your judgment by testing hypotheses—don’t prove them

I once believed that a free-trial giveaway was the surest way to win new subscribers. I launched a flashy campaign, expecting sign-ups to skyrocket. Instead, engagement barely budged. My hypothesis—“Free trials drive adoption”—looked solid on paper, but I hadn’t tried to break it. So I ran a reverse test: I offered a shorter, paid pilot at a discounted rate to half the list and no free trial to the other half. The paid-pilot group converted at twice the rate of the free-trial group.

That humbling result taught me a rocket-science lesson: proving yourself wrong is the fastest path to truth. Like physicists testing if light is a wave or a particle, you must design your idea so it can fail. If it survives that, you can trust it more. Otherwise, you’re just echoing biases.

Every product launch, every strategy session, should begin with a ruthless question—“What would falsify my plan?” That perspective turns your best idea into the red team’s battlefield. Fail fast if it’s flawed, succeed faster if it’s right.

In science, a hypothesis isn’t a mantra. It’s a target for tests. The more you embrace respectful self-falsification, the more reliable your ideas become. And that discipline will spare you from costly missteps and steer you to strategies that actually work.

You start by summarizing your top idea in one sentence, then design a miniature test that would disprove it—like A/B variants or pilot changes. You run that test as soon as possible and look for the signs of failure you defined. If it fails, you pivot quickly; if not, you double down but prepare another test. This approach—test not to prove but to disprove—sharpens every decision you make. Give it a go on your next campaign.