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

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

According to Buddhist legend, on the night Gautama Buddha was conceived, his mother dreamed of a white elephant. And so for many centuries, white elephants were sacred in many Southeast Asian countries. Receiving a white elephant as a gift from a monarch was a great honor. But it was also a curse, as the animal was extremely expensive to maintain, protected from labor by local laws, and impossible to give away. People were stuck with this beautiful but useless possession with ruinous maintenance costs. Most of us have at least once created a white elephant for ourselves, whether it’s staying in a job despite feeling miserable, continuing to invest in a failing business because we’ve already spent lots of money trying to make it work, or not breaking up because we’ve been in a relationship with someone for so long already. In an absurd escalation of commitment, we keep putting in the effort even if the outcomes become increasingly negative, as long as our behavior aligns with our previous decisions and actions.

I call the quitting option pause, again with intention. This not only eases the stigma of throwing in the towel but also reflects what quitting often is: a strategic temporary decision. Curious minds understand that the future holds infinite and unimaginable possibilities, including the potential to restart an abandoned experiment.

What part of the pact can be adjusted so I can keep learning and growing despite changing circumstances?

By staying nimble and making adjustments when required, you can keep your experiment on track through changing tides. Be iterative, not dogmatic: approach this process with the humility of a scientist, not the rigidity of an officer following orders. Few aspects of life are like a military exercise in which speed defines success. As long as you’re learning and growing, it doesn’t matter if your route meanders. Your pact should evolve along with you.

No matter how good your tool or deliberative your thought process, one thing never changes: There is no right choice. If you’re used to zero-sum thinking, that point of view may frustrate you. But it’s almost impossible to fail when you see everything as an experiment. In a life of experimentation, there is no wrong choice, either. A pact isn’t a destination. It’s a path you walk to discover more about yourself and the world. Success and failure are fluid constructs, not fixed labels. If you simply keep going as is, it means you found an ideal groove—amazing! If you decide to stop, it means this direction didn’t feel good—now you know!

Instead, he accepted the outcome, choosing to remain curious about the future rather than dwell on the past.

If giving in to life’s whims without ever giving up can unlock doors we never knew existed, why do we struggle with remaining nimble in the face of disruption?

Disruptive life events and personal stressors are associated with both anxiety and depression. In fact, a growing number of psychologists believe that disruptive life events play more of a role in someone’s development of a mental illness than genetics do. That’s why, over thousands of years, philosophers and spiritual leaders have advocated for a healthy form of letting go. Buddhism teaches that suffering arises from attachment to desires, including the desire for control over outcomes. Taoism talks about wu wei, which can be translated as “effortless action.” This doesn’t mean inaction but rather acting in harmony with the flow of life, without force or resistance. Similarly, in Hindu philosophy, vairagya is the detachment that allows us to experience greater levels of tranquility.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Accepting life’s disruptions doesn’t make you passive; it makes you agile.

You want to translate these bodily responses into a language your mind can assimilate. For this, let’s use a technique psychologists call affective labeling, which helps you better manage your physiological responses by naming your emotional states. Research has found that labeling our emotions results in higher brain activity in our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in charge of executive functioning, which, as we discussed in chapter 4, includes managing tasks, making decisions, and focusing attention. It also reduces activity in the amygdala, a region that plays an important role in emotional processing and the fight-or-flight response.

Affective labeling is literally “putting feelings into words.” As you do this, vague anxieties crystallize into a clear set of solid emotions.

The pioneer of writing therapy, James W. Pennebaker, explained that labeling our emotions relieves our brains of the burdensome task of processing them. Once you have those words, it’s much easier to investigate the...

When you surround yourself with people who encourage you to experiment and grow, you will unlock new communities of practice and creative territories you couldn’t have discovered on your own. Instead of being the result of solitary thinking, your ideas become woven into a narrative that people want to be a part of.

By compounding individual curiosity, social flow has three powerful effects—and it’s these that make a community uniquely valuable, much more so than its members’ status or strategic influence.

People who are action-oriented tend to thrive in new or unfamiliar environments, as they quickly take initiative rather than getting stuck in indecision.

“A lot of the advice I give first-time hosts is to let their guests know what to expect,” Nick Gray, author of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, told me. “Especially for introverts or people with social anxiety, that will help with psychological safety.”

Don’t hold the reins too tight. While having a vision is important, too much structure can stifle spontaneity and creativity. Giving members freedom to take the initiative can lead to unexpected manifestations of collective curiosity, and embracing distributed leadership, where responsibilities are shared among group members, promotes collaboration and shared decision-making.

“If you’re genuinely curious and you want to learn from them, most of the world’s top experts want to share their knowledge because they’re very curious themselves. So if you go at it from an angle of curiosity and willingness to learn, and ask them interesting questions, they’re likely to give you a shot and teach you something.”

In a sea of dry information, her openness offers a reminder that behind the work there is a human, one who welcomes connection.

Growth often comes from struggle, frustration, confusion—but we usually keep those moments private for fear of being exposed as a “fraud.” We worry that others will judge us as unqualified despite these being common experiences in the learning process. Learning in public is the opposite of pretending you have everything figured out.

Instead, share your real work in real time—the raw stuff, not ...

This is how Pieter Levels created Nomad List, a platform to discover the best places to live for digital nomads. Nomad List began as a modest spreadsheet that Levels made public to crowdsource data from Twitter in 2014. People added the data he requested, but then went further, adding columns for indicators such as level of safety, LGBTQ-friendliness, and coffee shop density. “I was slightly stunned by the response,” he said. Based on the data, he quickly put together a minimally viable version of the Nomad List platform, documenting the process in public. That early prototype drew enthusiastic notice in Forbes, Lifehacker, Business Insider, and many more press outlets; even Tim Ferriss shared it with his audience.

Learning in public unlocks powerful mechanisms to support your personal and professional growth:

“expertise” is a mirage; the closer you get, the more illusory it seems. That’s why even old hands still get the jitters before putting themselves out there. Whatever your level of knowledge, learning in public will always be an act of vulnerability. In fact, this is the whole point: by sharing the journey instead of the result, you gain expertise over time without ever pretending to know everything about the topic.

“Everybody has knowledge that they didn’t have a couple of weeks ago or a couple of years ago,” he told me. You’re always a little ahead of someone else, which means sharing what you know could be helpful to at least one person. You might never get to know everything, but you’ll always know enough to learn in public.

Just as with good old public speaking, “putting in the reps” is how we become comfortable with learning in public. The fear will never be completely gone, but it becomes more like a quiet companion than a cruel bully. You might even start to welcome the fear as a sign that you’re about to do something you care about.

the key is to integrate learning in public with the work you do already.

Learning in public has helped her shift from linear goals to a more generative way of ensuring her research has a wide impact and reaches the people who need it most.

“Some people may think that it’s crazy for me to be shifting gears like this, but I think it’s even crazier to sit on the sidelines while the biggest paradigm shift in medicine is unfolding right before our eyes,” she told me. Learning in public doesn’t have to lead to a career change, but you won’t know the full range of opportunities at your disposal until you start sharing your curiosity with the world. Ultimately, the key is to practice authenticity with boundaries, or what architects call an intimacy gradient between your emergent interests and your established reputation.

The human brain is wired to respond to social feedback, which affects our self-perception and behavior—a response that translates to our interactions on social media. When shared publicly, your work becomes content for others to react to, distorting your priorities and skewing them toward pursuing public validation over personal values. Will you become too focused on external validation? How will you handle negative feedback or criticism?

Again, his curiosity proved contagious. In its first year, his newsletter reached over one hundred thousand subscribers. And who knows where Tossell will go next? Even he doesn’t know, and this is an essential part of the fun. What Tossell shares with many other curious minds profiled in this book is that he hasn’t followed a predefined path for his career. Instead of focusing on a destination, he simply moves in the direction of his curiosity, constantly exploring where he can grow, who he wants to grow with, and how he can contribute positively to the world. This approach results in a fluid outlook on life, where progress is defined not only by what you learn and earn, but also by the positive impact you create.

This is how you discover your life’s meaning—by focusing on your daily actions rather than the content of your future eulogy.

“Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instill ambition in others,…but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift, of having been a full participant in the conversation.”

Prioritize Impact Over Image

Serial entrepreneurs embody this principle. They often share detailed “postmortems” of their failed ventures, transparently analyzing what went wrong and what they learned. By doing so, they not only maintain the trust of their investors and team members but also contribute to the entrepreneurial community’s collective wisdom, helping others avoid similar pitfalls and build on their insights. Even failure becomes generative.

Consistently closing the loop builds trust in you as a person who will bring a commitment to learning and growth to any collaborative effort, especially those with unique challenges and unclear outcomes. Although your path won’t feature the traditional milestones expected in a linear career, people will know they can count on you to get started, learn as you go, and share your insights in a way that contributes to the collective good—even if you fail, and perhaps especially so.

Ultimately, the most powerful tool at your disposal is your ability to reinvent, reimagine, and reshape your career journey in ways that generate value for yourself and others, as the world around you itself transforms.

I haven’t figured it all out myself, and I know I never will. I’m just excited to share what I have learned so far, and I selfishly want more people on the journey with me so I can learn from them in return.

Make friends with procrastination. Procrastination is not an enemy to be conquered, but a meaningful signal that something is amiss—a mismatch between your rational aspirations (head), your emotional needs (heart), and your practical skills (hand). Approach procrastination from a place of curiosity to identify its cause and adjust your course of action.

In the liminal space called life, we are in perpetual transition from one identity to another, from one question to the next, a succession of twists and turns, each an opportunity to learn about the world and connect with others. Success is the lifelong experiment of discovering what makes you feel most alive.