Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
Anne-Laure Le Cunff's new book offers a clear and inspiring guide for readers to harness their curiosity and craft a more meaningful and interesting life.
Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Avery
I’ve never been one to put together a five-year plan for myself—I find there's too much uncertainty, too many unknowns to commit to any one course of action for that long of a time. Consider the fact that, exactly five years after I’d graduated from college, I found myself sheltering in place as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold worldwide, and a job that was supposed to involve lots of cross-country travel and hands-on fieldwork suddenly turned into a remote job filled with endless Zoom calls. It was a situation I couldn’t have anticipated, one that threw everyone’s best-laid plans out the window.
Neuroscientist and entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s new book, Tiny Experiments, asks readers to try a different approach to life. “No more SMART goal setting; no more five-year career plans; no more life road maps,” Le Cunff writes. Instead, she encourages readers to think of life as an experimental sandbox. To do so means engaging with our curiosity, investigating the things that make us come alive, and making small, manageable commitments to try out new activities and learn more about ourselves along the way.
To design a tiny experiment, Le Cunff advises that one make a pact: “a simple and repeatable activity that will inevitably bring you closer to achieving your authentic ambitions, regardless of the actual result of each trial.” The format of a pact is: “I will [action] for [duration].” Rather than setting up outcome-based goals (examples that Le Cunff offers include “I will write a book” or “I will run a marathon”), pacts offer an alternative that opens an instant path to exploration (“I will write every weekday for the next six months” or “I will run every Sunday for six weeks”). Le Cunff argues that this method of trial and error is more successful because a pact creates a sense of purpose, is immediately actionable, offers consistent data to learn from, and is easily trackable (i.e., did you do what you set out to do, yes or no?).
Reading Tiny Experiments, I was reminded of the two-week reset challenge from Amie McNee’s We Need Your Art, in which creatives engage in the fundamentals of their craft to rebuild their momentum. Both McNee and Le Cunff underscore the importance of curiosity coupled with action. By doing or creating something tangible in the present moment, we learn more about our own potential and can explore, as Le Cunff writes, “a world of possibilities beyond the outcomes you can imagine today.”
Both McNee and Le Cunff also stress that our personal experimentations can have a greater impact on the community around us. What might be a simple doodle posted on social media, a recipe cooked and shared with a friend, or a new club formed to bring together like-minded thinkers, all done in the spirit of trying something new, may become the thing that brightens someone’s day and makes the world a slightly better place to live in. We owe it to ourselves and to the people around us to keep constantly evolving and growing.
Whether you’re looking to make a change in your personal or professional endeavors, Tiny Experiments offers a clear and inspiring guide to harnessing your curiosity and crafting a more meaningful and interesting life for yourself. “Your life is made for your searching—not for a predefined destination,” Le Cunff writes, “but for the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of knowing that your efforts are making a positive difference in the world.”
