Try Something. See What Happens.

My wife thinks of everything.

No matter what she’s doing, she looks at things from different angles, different perspectives. She notices small details most people brush past without a second thought.

Like the bathroom.

When we remodeled our guest bathroom, she made sure to place a caddy right in front of the toilet for fragrant soaps and other essentials. But the top shelf is dedicated to a row of small books—nothing fancy, just enough to pass the time while you… handle business. Who thinks of that?

That’s how I came across a little book called Quotations by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I opened it to the first page and read this:

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia, May 22, 1932

That line, “But above all, try something,” struck a chord with me because it speaks directly to what my diary is all about.

Experimenting.

I smoke a lot of cigars. Even though most of my published reviews are of cigars I’ve rated 90 and above, I’ve smoked plenty of dogs. You just don’t see them because I don’t bother writing about anything I’d score below an 87. As I once told my good friend Katman, “I don’t have the time or energy for negativity.”

Trying new cigars is a crap shoot.

You can do all the homework you want. Read reviews. Study blends and leaf characteristics. None of it guarantees anything. That’s the risk. But it’s also the point.

Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

The same applies here. If you only stick to what you already know, you’ll always have something good to smoke. But you’ll never find something better. You’ll never stumble onto that cigar that makes you stop and take notice—the one that doesn’t just work, but actually says something. And those cigars are out there.

You just have to be willing to take the shot.

Admittedly, I’ve been a bit of a mad scientist in my experimentation—especially early on. I tried everything I could get my hands on. Different wrappers. Different countries. Different factories. Different blenders. It didn’t matter. Some were great. Many weren’t. Most fell somewhere in between.

But every cigar taught me something and helped me hone my sense of what works for me and what doesn’t.

It goes back to what Wayne Gretzky and Roosevelt were getting at. You have to put in the reps to figure out what you like and what you don’t. In other words:

Try something. See what happens.