Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. —Mae Jemison, American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut

life is made of cycles of being lost and finding ourselves again. Feeling lost and free, I started thinking about my in-between time not as a dead end to escape, but as a space worth exploring. And with that mindset, I quickly became reacquainted with an old friend and ally: curiosity.

Why do we think the way we think and feel the way we feel? The more books I read, the more intrigued I became, until I eventually decided to return to school to study

neuroscience.

I asked myself: What experiment could I run on my own life that would bring me an intrinsic sense of fulfillment, whatever the outcome?

The uncertainty of my future isn’t gone, and yet each day I wake up excited to discover what new crossroads life will present to me. I’m always on the lookout for new experiments. I’m not rushing to get to a specific destination. I’m playing a different game: a game of noticing, questioning, and adapting.

Systematic curiosity provides an unshakable certitude in your ability to grow even when the exact path forward is uncertain, with the knowledge that your actions can align with your most authentic ambitions.

Pact Commit to Curiosity

We were all born with this sense of adventure. It’s in children’s nature to experiment and explore the unknown. They learn first and foremost through movement, which is considered the foundational skill for developing emotional, cognitive, and social skills.

This common shift from boundless curiosity to narrow determination is at the heart of why the traditional approach to goals keeps on letting us down; it impedes our creativity and prevents us from seeing and seizing new opportunities.

The Trap of Linear Goals

All these approaches to goal setting are based on linear goals: they were created for controlled environments that lend to readily measurable outcomes with predictable timelines. The linear way is wildly out of sync with the lives we live today.

“No goals, just vibes.”

Linear goals stimulate fear. Starting something new is daunting, especially when it lies far outside our comfort zone. Because we lack the expertise that comes with experience, we’re not sure where to begin. Sometimes the sheer number of options leads to analysis paralysis. We become so overwhelmed with choices that we are unable to take action.

Linear goals encourage toxic productivity. Researchers who explored our relationship to idleness found that “many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.”

Linear goals breed competition and isolation. When everyone around us is climbing the same ladder, scrambling over one another, we become competitive for all the wrong reasons.

We receive constant reminders of the supposedly perfect lives of everyone in our network. And so our definition of success keeps on ballooning as we progress. This phenomenon is called the Red Queen effect.

Our goals are often not even our own; we borrow them from peers, celebrities, and what we imagine society expects from us. French philosopher René Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire: we desire something because we see others desiring it. In

other words, our goals mimic the goals of others.

everyone is showing only a distorted version of their lives, snapshots of manufactured happiness where all the struggle and the doubt have been edited out.

Delight, calm, curiosity. Removed from your everyday, you find yourself relaxing—yes, even in that uncomfortable seat. In this strange space, you feel an invigorating sense of possibility. You might crack a book you’ve been curious about but had no time for. Watch a movie that friends would be surprised to see you enjoy. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Maybe you write in your journal, reflecting on what’s passed and mulling over what’s to come. Freed from your usual duties, released from the constraints of your day-to-day identity, you find the mental space to do something a little bit different. The flight I have just described is a liminal space—an in-between territory where the old rules governing our choices no longer apply. Life is full of these moments, and the degree to which we learn to reap their lessons is the degree to which we grow and improve our lives.

one of three defense mechanisms, where we abandon our curiosity, our ambition, or both:

Cynicism: Doomscrolling, passing up opportunities, poking fun at earnest people. Like the Beast before he meets Belle, we see transformation as a source of meaningless work, and we abandon any desire to build a good life. Why suffer when we can just survive? Escapism: Retail therapy, binge watching, dream planning. Like Peter Pan, we confine ourselves to an island where we can break free from the burden of our responsibilities, an idealized

place to get away from the uncertainty of our lives. Perfectionism: Self-coercion, information hoarding, toxic productivity. We treat ourselves the way the stepmother treats Cinderella—“from morning until evening, she had to perform difficult work, rising early, carrying water,...

From fixed ladders to growth loops. Relying on a mental model of traditional goal setting means the focus is on linear progression toward a predefined outcome. Each rung represents a measurable achievement, a predictable step along a planned trajectory, which leaves little room for surprise or serendipity. When we shift to a “loop” mental model, the journey follows iterative cycles of experimentation, with each loop building on the last. Our task becomes to widen each loop by nurturing our creativity and leaning into promising tangents instead of dismissing them as distractions.

When we are operating with an outcome-based definition of success, progress means ticking off big, hairy, audacious goals. When we shift to a process-based definition, progress is driven by incremental experimentation.

Escaping the Tyranny of Purpose

In his MasterClass, he encourages students to design the life they want to lead, a life made of twists and turns that make it

their life, not the linear life that’s predesigned for them—a life that makes for a good story.

When we fixate on finding one singular purpose, we rule out the side quests that help us grow the most. Your life doesn’t

need to follow predictable acts and arcs. The best stories are full of surprises, with colorful characters and unexpected plot twists. To avoid recycling old stories, we need to break free from the scripts we write for ourselves.

The Sequel script is why we maintain the same roles and behaviors in our relationships, such as always being the “quiet one” in our circle of friends even when we feel a desire to express ourselves more openly. It makes us cling to our past successes, trying to repeat them. It limits our imagination by making us rehash old tales instead of facing the discomfort of a blank page.

Can you even hear yourself when so many voices tell you what to do next? In the thicket of all those exhortations to write your story within the well-defined conventions of cognitive scripts, it’s easy to become disconnected from yourself and your curiosity. Fortunately, just like you have learned these scripts, you can unlearn them.

Are you following your past or discovering your path?

Are you following the crowd or discovering your tribe? Are you following your passion or discovering your curiosity?

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” To escape those old ideas, think of yourself as an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study. Anthropology requires “the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.”

For just one day, I invite you to play a game of self-anthropology. It’s a game of curiosity, an exercise in receptiveness, a way to deactivate your cognitive scripts. It’s a fun opportunity to conduct

an audit of your life and reevaluate your goals. There is no need for fancy tools or scientific equipment. Simply create a new note on your phone so you can jot down thoughts as you go about your day. Call it “Field Notes” or another title that feels playful or meaningful. Then, whenever something crosses your mind, write a time stamp and a few words.

When you collect lots of small data points, you create a “breadcrumb trail” and are more likely to notice overarching trends than if you were to focus only on the most salient experiences. Because of the time stamps, you’ll easily be able to remember where you were.

If you observed that you dread giving presentations, maybe improv classes could help build your confidence. If you feel anxious in the morning, maybe meditation could help regulate your emotions. If you enjoy graphic design, maybe freelancing could help you strengthen your portfolio. Observation Question Hypothesis

A Pact to Turn Doubts into Experiments

At that point, it would have been easy for him to take things for granted. He had an enjoyable job, made good money, and knew a lot of interesting people. But Kallaway noticed that his progress was stalling. Until he had an idea: What if he made a public oath to devote at least an hour to coding every day for the next three months—and why not round it up to a hundred days? This public oath was a pact: a pledge to engage in a particular activity for a predetermined period of time. The #100DaysOfCode challenge,

By the time the 100 days were over, Kallaway had not only become a better coder but had inspired many others to commit to their own challenge. He is now at the center of a global community of thousands of developers, all learning and growing together.

Designing a Tiny Experiment By unlearning your cognitive scripts, collecting data on your life, and brainstorming potential hypotheses to test, you have already reawakened your perception of what is possible.

What makes a pact so effective is that it focuses on your outputs

We have very little control over how we feel, which is why it’s hard to force ourselves to feel motivated. A pact solves this challenge by emphasizing doing over planning. As psychologist and philosopher William James explained: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

The Power of Repeated Trials

Confidence isn’t a quality we are born with or something that magically happens; it’s built through action. To create confidence, you need to get started. Every time you act, you bet on

yourself and gather evidence that you can do what you set out to do.

Repeated trials are an essential feature of experiments. You need enough trials to obt...