I Wanna Try This! A Beginner’s Guide to Saying Yes to New Experiences

There’s a particular feeling that arrives without warning. You’re scrolling through photos of a friend’s hiking trip, watching a cooking video at midnight, or overhearing a conversation about pottery classes at the coffee shop. Something lights up inside you — a small, electric spark — and before you can talk yourself out of it, three words form in your mind: I wanna try this.

That feeling is one of the most honest things about you. It’s curiosity in its purest form, unfiltered by doubt or practicality, the part of you that hasn’t forgotten how to want things. The tragedy is that most of us let it pass without acting on it. We close the tab, finish our coffee, and go back to the routine we already know. The spark fades. Life continues as it was.

This post is about not letting that happen. It’s about catching that spark, examining it, and doing something with it — whether “this” is a new hobby, a cuisine you’ve never cooked, a sport you’ve always admired from the sidelines, a creative pursuit you secretly dream about, or simply a small adventure in a city you’ve lived in for years without really exploring.

Why We Feel the Pull Toward New Things

Before we talk about how to try something new, it helps to understand why we want to in the first place. That urge isn’t random, and it’s not just restlessness. Psychologists have studied novelty-seeking behavior for decades, and what they’ve found is both reassuring and fascinating.

Our brains are wired to find new experiences rewarding. When we encounter something unfamiliar, the brain releases dopamine — the same neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation. This is an evolutionary inheritance. Early humans who were curious about unfamiliar plants, tools, and territories were more likely to survive and find resources than those who stayed rigidly in their comfort zones. Curiosity, in a very real sense, kept our ancestors alive.

That drive didn’t disappear. It just got redirected. Today we feel it when we see someone doing something we’ve never tried, when we taste a dish we can’t identify, when we stumble across a skill or craft that feels foreign and magnetic at the same time. The brain is still doing its job, flagging the unfamiliar as potentially valuable and nudging you toward it.

There’s also something deeper at work. Research on psychological wellbeing consistently identifies the expansion of one’s sense of self as a key component of happiness. When we try new things, we don’t just learn a skill — we add a new dimension to who we are. You were a person who had never painted. Then you were a person who tried painting once. Then maybe you became a person who paints. Each new experience is a small act of self-construction, and over time those acts accumulate into something meaningful: a richer, more textured version of your life.

The Wall Between Wanting and Doing

If wanting to try new things is so natural and beneficial, why do so many of us spend years saying we want to do something without ever actually doing it?

The answer usually comes down to a cluster of obstacles that feel practical but are mostly psychological.

Fear of looking foolish is probably the most common. We live in a world that valorizes competence, and there’s a quiet shame that comes with being a beginner. You imagine yourself fumbling through the first salsa class, mispronouncing the name of a dish you’re trying to order, or producing a piece of pottery that looks nothing like the elegant bowl you saw in your inspiration photos. That imagined embarrassment can feel more vivid than the actual experience ever would be.

Perfectionism compounds this. Many people don’t try new things because they can’t stand the idea of doing them badly. This is especially true for people who have been high achievers in some area of their lives. When you’re used to being good at things, being a beginner feels like a step backward rather than a beginning.

Time scarcity is real but often overestimated. We’re busy. Work, family, obligations — they fill the calendar. But most new things, in their early stages, don’t require dramatic time commitments. The issue is usually not the absence of time but the absence of prioritization.

Waiting for the perfect moment is a close cousin to time scarcity and equally paralyzing. You’ll try that cooking class when things calm down at work. You’ll start running when the weather gets better. You’ll learn guitar after the holidays. The perfect moment is a myth that the future keeps making promises about and never delivering.

Cost is worth acknowledging honestly. Some new experiences do require money, and not everyone has the same access. But it’s worth auditing your assumptions here — many beginners vastly overestimate the startup cost of a new hobby, and many communities offer free or low-cost ways to try things before you commit.

A Practical Framework for Actually Trying Something

The best way to move from “I wanna try this” to “I tried this” is to make the gap between intention and action as small as possible. Here’s a framework that works.

Step one: Write it down immediately. When that spark of curiosity hits, capture it before it disappears. Keep a running list on your phone, a notebook, a note on your desk — the format doesn’t matter. What matters is that the idea has a physical record somewhere outside your head. Ideas that exist only in memory get quietly buried under everything else demanding your attention.

Step two: Lower the bar of entry. Don’t sign up for a ten-week course before you know if you enjoy the activity. Don’t buy all the gear. Don’t book a trip. Find the smallest, lowest-commitment version of the experience available to you. Watch a YouTube tutorial. Try a single beginner class. Borrow equipment from a friend. Read one book on the subject. The goal is a first contact, not a commitment ceremony.

Step three: Separate exploration from evaluation. On your first attempt, the only thing you’re allowed to assess is whether the experience felt interesting. Not whether you were good, not whether you’d want to do it professionally, not whether it matches the idealized version in your head. Just: was there something engaging here? Did I want to know more? That’s the only question.

Step four: Schedule the follow-up before you leave the first try. This is the step most people skip, and it’s the most important. Momentum dies between sessions. If you try a pottery class and think “I’d like to do that again,” pull out your phone right then and either book the next class or put it on your calendar. Future-you is busy and distracted and will not remember this intention with the same vividness that present-you has right now.

Step five: Talk about it. Tell someone you’re going to try something. Not for accountability in the aggressive, public-commitment sense, but because verbalizing an intention makes it more real. It also opens the door to unexpected connections — the person you told might have tried the same thing, might know someone who can help, or might want to try it with you.

Ideas to Spark Your Own List

Part of the joy of “I wanna try this” is that the list is entirely personal. But if you’re in a rut and struggling to remember what you’re curious about, here are some prompts across different categories that might trigger a spark.

In the kitchen, you might try making bread from scratch, learning to cook a cuisine that’s completely foreign to your upbringing, attempting to replicate a dish from a restaurant you love, or hosting a dinner party built around a theme. Cooking is one of the most accessible new experiences available to almost anyone — the ingredients are already in your life, and the feedback is immediate and delicious.

In movement, there are more options now than at any other point in history. Rock climbing gyms, dance studios, martial arts schools, running groups, cycling clubs, yoga in every conceivable style, swimming, rowing, tennis for adults who’ve never played, archery, fencing, parkour — the range is extraordinary. Movement-based experiences have the added benefit of physical health, but more than that, they tend to produce a specific kind of focused presence that’s increasingly rare and deeply satisfying.

In creativity, the range is equally wide. Drawing, watercolor, oil painting, ceramics, throwing pottery, woodworking, leatherwork, jewelry making, embroidery, calligraphy, photography, filmmaking, music — any instrument at any age — writing in any form, improv comedy, acting, stand-up. Many cities have community studios and makerspaces that offer drop-in sessions with no commitment.

In learning, consider picking up a language, studying a period of history that’s always intrigued you, taking a free online course in a subject completely unrelated to your work, learning to code, studying astronomy or botany or mycology as a hobby, reading deeply about a topic you’ve always been superficially curious about.

In experience, think about volunteering in a field you’ve never been part of, attending a religious or cultural ceremony outside your own tradition with respectful curiosity, visiting a part of your own city or town you’ve never spent time in, trying a type of travel you’ve never done — a solo trip, a road trip with no itinerary, a camping trip if you’ve always been a hotel person.

On Being a Beginner

There’s something worth saying directly about the experience of being new at something, because our culture doesn’t honor it enough.

Being a beginner is not a lesser state waiting to be overcome on the way to competence. It’s a full experience in itself, with its own texture and gifts. Beginners see things that experts can no longer see. They ask questions that reveal assumptions experts stopped questioning long ago. They make mistakes that are, often, more creative and interesting than the technically correct version.

There’s a concept in Zen philosophy called “beginner’s mind” — the idea that an open, curious, non-expert relationship with something allows you to see it more clearly and freshly than accumulated expertise sometimes permits. The beginner’s mind isn’t just a consolation prize for not yet being good at something. It’s a genuinely valuable cognitive state that becomes harder to access the more skilled you get.

This is worth remembering the next time you feel embarrassed about not knowing something. Your not-knowing is not a deficiency. It’s the specific condition that makes genuine discovery possible. Experts can refine and optimize. Only beginners can be truly surprised.

When to Keep Going and When to Move On

Not everything you try will become a passion, and that’s completely fine. The goal of trying new things isn’t to find your one true calling and pursue it exclusively forever. It’s to stay alive to the range of your own interests and to keep accumulating experience.

Some things you try will surprise you by becoming important. You’ll go to one cooking class and find yourself meal-planning with genuine excitement for the first time. You’ll try trail running and discover a peace you’ve been looking for in quieter places. You’ll pick up a camera and realize you’ve been composing images in your head for years without knowing it.

Other things will be interesting once and that’s enough. You tried paddleboarding. It was fine. You got wet. You’d do it again on vacation but you’re not going to build a life around it. That’s a perfectly complete experience. You learned something about what that activity actually is, which is more than you knew before.

And some things will be genuinely not for you, and you’ll know it in your body after one session. That knowledge is also valuable. You can stop wondering.

The only real rule is not to decide too quickly. Most new experiences have a learning curve that makes the first attempt feel awkward and unrewarding. Give yourself at least two or three genuine attempts before concluding that something isn’t for you, because often what feels bad at the beginning is just the specific discomfort of unfamiliarity rather than evidence of incompatibility.

A Life Built on Curiosity

Here’s the larger picture underneath all of this. The people who seem most alive — who have that quality of engagement and energy that you notice and find appealing — are almost universally people who have kept saying yes to new things throughout their lives. Not recklessly, not constantly, not at the expense of depth or commitment. But consistently enough that their lives have continued to expand rather than contract.

Routine has real value. Mastery takes time and repetition. Deep relationships require consistency. I’m not arguing against any of that. But within the structure of a life well-organized, there’s always room for the question: what do I want to try next?

That spark — the one that fires when you watch someone do something you’ve never done, when you taste something unfamiliar and delicious, when you hear music that makes you think about the instrument that made it — that spark is worth following. Not every time, not at the expense of everything else, but regularly enough that you don’t lose the habit of following it.

The world is unreasonably full of interesting things to do, make, learn, taste, build, and become. You will not get to all of them. But you can get to more of them than you currently do, starting with the one that’s already on your mind right now.

You know the one. You’ve been thinking about it since before you started reading this.

Go try it.