TL;DR
Life is full of hidden “sandboxes”—low-risk opportunities to build confidence and skills for your big dreams. Like regulatory sandboxes, they let you experiment, learn, and grow without the fear of major failure. The key? Stay alert and recognize these chances in everyday tasks. By treating even small projects as practice for your larger goals, you can gradually gain the experience and belief needed to tackle bigger challenges. Just avoid overconfidence—balance is crucial. Embrace your sandboxes, but don’t waste them!
Sandbox, n
A testing environment in a computer system in which new or untested software or coding can be run securely.
Around the world, technology often evolves at a quicker rate than governments’ ability to play arbiter. Consequently, governments are often unsure on how to regulate nascent technologies. It should be considered a good thing that they are not oblivious to this phenomenon. For in most cases, the business of government is clunky and consequential - it is expensive (financially and time-wise), and the consequences of bad regulation could be dire both in terms of the damage caused and the new resources expended in frenetic damage-control initiatives. In view of this, an approach that has become increasingly popular among regulators has been the adoption of an agile approach to regulation through the use of regulatory sandboxes.
According to an EU Parliament members’ briefing on the Artificial intelligence act and regulatory sandboxes the major advantages of regulatory sandboxes are that “they foster business learning, i.e. the development and testing of innovations in a real-world environment; and support regulatory learning, i.e. the formulation of experimental legal regimes to guide and support businesses in their innovation activities under the supervision of a regulatory authority.” These sandboxes allow experimental innovation with controlled risks and supervision, and simultaneously improve the regulator’s understanding of the ecosystem and appreciation of the potential consequences of certain actions on a larger scale.
Since writing in “Sustainable self-confidence is about collecting data” that sustainable self-confidence is built by consistently collecting evidence of past successes, I have caught myself thinking further about how we really come to believe in our abilities. In the just mentioned article, I argued that we could build confidence by getting so good at a particular task and then trusting our ability to perform that task alone, or getting very good at seemingly unrelated tasks and then leveraging our ability to generalize beyond those tasks to perform any tasks. Useful as both approaches may be, they both leave us with the classic problem young graduates face: they need experience to get a job, but they also need a job to gain experience. How can one (especially one who is lacking in self-confidence) develop self-confidence when its possession is itself a prerequisite?
My answer is simple and probably contestable. More often than we realize, life gives us sandboxes on which we can practice a random assortment of skills and build the confidence to perform the associated tasks. As with the EU’s regulatory sandboxes, life’s generous sandboxes come with less risk, more control, and increased learning opportunities. These sandboxes are in such great supply that we do not need to be in pursuit of them. Just as a mouse trap sits in supreme and undisturbed tranquility yet stays true to its purpose when opportunity presents itself, we need not go out hunting for sandboxes, but only need to identify and take advantage of them when they come; we need to be professional sandbox opportunists.
If you think of yourself as a regulator, and whatever project or dream you have as an emerging technology that needs to be regulated, then your sandboxes are whichever situations that allow you to build the confidence and skill needed for your project with considerably lower risks and a good chance of transfering whatever knowledge or confidence to more consequential situations.
Suppose that you dream of building pyramids in your hometown (the pyramids of [insert your hometown]). If you are lucky, you could go around working under people who are already building pyramids to learn what it takes to build a pyramid and grow the confidence in your ability that is necessary for such an undertaking. This is exactly what we do when we take a job with the hope that it will equip us with the experience that is necessary for our “real” dream job (forget what you said at the interview). But what happens if no one is building pyramids? Does one have to sit on their dream till they can do what lucky people do? Some people do exactly that. Some people, however, are in the business of making common experiences sandboxes for their pyramids in-waiting; they continuously create and refine their mental models on pyramid building, and in doing so ultimately develop the confidence required to build pyramids. How do they go about this?
A simple but effective way some people go about this is to turn as many things as possible into pseudo-pyramid-building projects and then see the completion of any associated tasks/actions as preparation for building pyramids. I call them pseudo-pyramid-building projects because while one might be lucky to come across situations that are in essence mini-pyramids, for any dream as daring as building a pyramid, this is easier said than realized. More often than not, one encounters a seemingly disconnected series of projects that contain only a few aspects that may be applicable to the pyramid-building world. However, the later type of projects, just like the former, is and must be recognized as a proxy to pyramid-building, and equally important lessons can be drawn from them. To someone who builds residential homes, the dream of building pyramids could turn every home building project into a sandbox for testing new techniques for making more resilient blocks, figuring out ingenious ways to lift heavy loads to considerable heights, and other aspects that will undoubtedly be crucial to building pyramids. Ironically, for such a person such opportunities are often enough to help them build self-confidence in their ability to at least attempt building pyramids (with minimal as opposed to totally inexistent risk).
An important caveat about sandboxes is that one must be on the lookout for them; if one is, they appear in legion, and if one is not, they are practically nonexistent. Imagine for once a young man who has dreams of becoming a football coach at the highest levels. Such clarity is enough to turn a simple game of football that is entertainment for other people into a profound inquiry of game strategy and the ability to decipher through mere observation the strategies of one’s opponents. If done sufficiently well, there is no doubt that this should lead to an increase in one’s confidence in their ability (and their ability to perform certain key aspects of managing a team). To such a person, a no-stake game of his peers during which he is given the often comical title of coach becomes a laboratory to hone their ability and confidence in developing and executing game strategy and tactics. However, to one who has no intentions of becoming a manager, the no-stakes nature of the game is a self-fulfilling prophecy and because there is nothing to be lost, the game is only a source of entertainment. Seneca the Younger (the stoic) wrote that “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable”. He was right about ports, sailing, and winds as he is about sandboxes, self-confidence, and building the muscle to realize our dreams. Life has an abundance of sandboxes, all we have to do is look.
The approach I describe here to taking everyday life experiences and stepping up the stakes so that we can practice and hopefully build the confidence to perform when the stakes are higher is not without risk. For all it is worth, one might develop a false sense of confidence by failing to properly appreciate the differences that may exist between the actual situation one is aspiring to and the proxy situation. One might also fail at the proxy situation (which is in itself important), because they had their minds busy projecting the situation into something that it is not. Essentially, the most obvious risk of using sandboxes is falling for the vice of excess.
Fortunately for us, Aristotle, the wise, had foreseen this from a general perspective, and his solutuons are just as applicaple to the particular. With other moral questions as with how to use sandboxes, we must strive for a mean - a situation that knows neither excess nor deficiency, and is just right. Nonetheless, the use of sandboxes to build self-confidence is more art than science, and if this article has convinced you to contemplate what this may mean for your unique station, then it must have been very succeesful.
Only remember: do not waste your sandboxes!