Last September I asked people to call me out whenever I complained. The first person to call me out would get $1. I probably got called out at least 100 times, and appreciate all of the help from everyone who did so.

It was pretty great as a way of crowdsourcing my own mindfulness around how much I complain (which wasn’t much, but definitely more than I had originally thought).

Another interesting side effect of the experience was that I had several good conversations about where the line is between complaining and speaking up about something that was undesirable.

I definitely came away with the conviction that not all complaining is undesirable. Maybe 90% of complaining was the kind I should be doing less of, and then about 10% of the complaining felt “good”, especially after I became better at catching myself in the process of wanting to vocalize a complaint.

Finally, I found that while Chirpify is a great service for giving money to people easily over Twitter, it turned out that most people didn’t actually want the dollar (and never claimed the dollar I sent to them).

I’ll be posting a new experiment soon branching out to more than just complaints, but for now, consider this experiment concluded.

PS. I highly recommend others to try something like this, building off of what I learned (or not). The full benefit of the experiment is probably only really achieved by actually going through with it yourself.