LIFE NEEDS MORE RANDOM THINGS
I think we need to do more fun, random things in life.
Not because they're productive. Not because they'll make us better at our jobs, look good on a résumé, or accomplish some bigger goal. Sometimes I think we should do things simply because they sound fun, different, or simply give us a good story to tell afterward.
That idea is what inspired me to start The Secret Entrance.
I'm 22, finishing college, working, and trying to figure out what I want the next few years of my life to look like. Like a lot of people, most of my weeks have a pretty predictable structure. School, work, dinner, scrolling through my phone, sleep, repeat.
There's nothing wrong with routine. We all need some version of it. But I've started to wonder why, as we get older, the random parts of life seem to slowly disappear.
As kids, we didn't need much of a reason to do something. We made things because we wanted to make them. We came up with ridiculous ideas and actually tried them. Somewhere along the way, everything starts needing a purpose.
I've always loved the opposite of that.
The spontaneous trip. Saying yes to something you normally wouldn't. Trying an idea when you have absolutely no idea if it's going to work. Doing something that seems a little ridiculous in the moment but becomes a story you keep telling years later.
I wanted to create more opportunities for those kinds of stories.
That's where The Secret Entrance came from.
THE SECRET ENTRANCE
The name is meant to capture the feeling I want every project to have. Imagine finding a door you didn't know existed. You don't completely know what's behind it, but that's exactly why you want to open it.
I want The Secret Entrance to create those doors.
Each one will lead to a different experiment — something unusual people can actually participate in rather than just watch. The experiments don't necessarily need to be connected. What connects them is the reason they exist: to give people an excuse to break out of their normal routine and do something they probably wouldn't have done otherwise.
Then I had to decide what should be behind the first door.Eventually, I landed on a book.Except I didn't want to write it.
I started wondering what would happen if you took 300 complete strangers, gave each of them exactly one page, and then stepped back.
That became Experiment 001.
Experiment 001
The idea is simple: 300 people. 300 pages. One book.
Each person gets one page and as much creative freedom as possible. There's no shared story they have to continue and no theme telling them what their page should be.
Someone might write a poem. Someone might draw something. Someone could share a photograph, tell a story, make a puzzle, write a joke, leave a message for a stranger, promote something they've created, or come up with something I haven't even considered.Then those 300 completely different pages become one physical book.
The uncertainty is probably what excites me most about it.
Normally, when you create something, you have a vision for the finished product. With Experiment 001, I don't want to know what the finished product looks like.
I can come up with the experiment, build the platform around it, establish the basic rules, and eventually bring everything together. But I don't want to decide what the book becomes. The 300 people participating get to do that.
Page 14 might contain something genuinely beautiful. Page 15 might be completely ridiculous. Page 200 could be a piece of art someone spent hours creating, while page 201 could contain five words.
I hope it's like that.
Because the goal was never really to create the world's greatest book.
The goal is to get 300 people to do something they probably never would have done otherwise.
If it works, there will eventually be 300 strangers who can pick up the same book and know that one little piece of it exists because of them. Most of them will probably never meet. They could live completely different lives and have nothing else in common.But they'll all be able to say, "I was part of that."
That's what I want The Secret Entrance to create: things people want to be part of because they sound interesting, unusual, or just fun.
THE FIRST EXPERIMENT
Experiment 001 is also an experiment for me.
When I first had the idea, I had no idea whether anyone else would care. I could spend months planning every detail, but there was really only one way to answer the question: put it out into the world and see what happened. So that's what I've been doing.
Right now, I'm seeing whether I can actually get enough strangers together to make Experiment 001 happen. If the interest is there, the plan is to open the 300 pages, let everyone create theirs, bring them all together, and publish the finished book.
I won't be taking one of the pages myself.
For me, that's important. I don't really see this as my book. My role is to create the experiment, find the people, and eventually bring what they make together. I want all 300 pages to belong to the strangers who decide to walk through that first door.And once Experiment 001 is finished, I want to open another one.
I don't know exactly what Experiment 002 will be yet. I have ideas, but I don't want The Secret Entrance to become a book company or lock itself into one type of project.The book is just the first test of a much bigger idea.
Can you create experiences that make someone's week a little less predictable?
Can you give strangers a reason to make something together?
Can something completely unnecessary still be worth doing just because it's fun?
I hope the answer to all three is yes.
Maybe some of these experiments will work. Maybe some will completely fail. Either way, we'll have a story. Life is going to give us plenty of serious moments whether we ask for them or not.I think we should make a little more room for the random ones.And for the first one, I want to find out if 300 complete strangers can write a book.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Matthew King is a 22-year-old college student and the creator of The Secret Entrance, a project based on a simple idea: life could use a few more fun, random things. Experiment 001 is his first attempt at turning that idea into something real.
When he's not working on The Secret Entrance, Matthew is finishing his finance degree at Palm Beach Atlantic University and working in marketing and business development. He hopes The Secret Entrance will grow into a series of unusual experiments that give people a reason to try something they otherwise never would have.
Learn more about The Secret Entrance and Experiment 001 at TheSecretEntrance.com.
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