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March 11 - March 27, 2025
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
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.
What experiment could I run on my own life that would bring me an intrinsic sense of fulfillment, whatever the outcome?
I’m playing a different game: a game of noticing, questioning, and adapting.
This book isn’t a step-by-step recipe for accomplishing a specific goal. Rather, it offers a set of tools you can adapt to discover and achieve your own goals—especially if these goals fall outside the well-defined ambitions suggested by society.
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.
when you lean into your curiosity, uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility, a space for metamorphosis. It’s a way to turn challenges into triggers for self-discovery and doubt into a source of opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
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. Success transforms from a fixed target to an unfolding path.
“Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”
By making you dream too big, the Epic script can keep you from performing small but meaningful experiments that could open unexpected doors. It may also lead you to opt for needlessly risky experiments when a smaller, safer version of the same experiment would have yielded sufficient data.
Alvin Toffler, the futurist who coined the term information overload in the 1970s, wrote that the illiterate of our times will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
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?
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.
After just twenty-four hours, you will have a treasure trove of data about a typical day in your life. Spend time reading your notes and reflecting. Look for recurring themes, interesting details, and general feelings that come up again and again.
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.
Instead of “I will write a book,” try “I will write every weekday for the next six months.”
Committing in advance to a specific duration for your experiment has an obvious advantage: it forces you to wait until after a pre-agreed number of iterations before making a decision.
In general, more repetitions will give you more data.
A survey of over 31 million activities by the team at Strava found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by January 12, which they called Quitter’s Day.
If you are hesitating between two versions of a pact, think tiny: What’s the smallest version of this experiment that you can run?
work.” You also don’t need to quit your job to conduct your experiment full time. Albert Einstein conducted most of his research while being employed as a patent examiner. Haruki Murakami wrote his first two books while running a jazz club.
Let’s be honest: Nobody really wants to live a productive life. We want to express ourselves, connect with others, and explore the world. Productivity is just a means to those ends; it should certainly not come at the expense of actually living life.
The shift from a quantitative view of time to a qualitative one is the first huge step toward a healthier approach to getting things done and finding a meaningful answer to how to make the most of our weeks.
So the forager understands something that many of us, sitting at our desks, staring at a daily calendar and a clock, lose sight of: not all moments are created equal. Some carry a particular weight, a unique potential; they are the precious ground from which our best ideas and most meaningful experiences can emerge.
“The productivity equation is a nonlinear one,” fiction writer Neal Stephenson explains. “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.”
Finally, heed and honor your body’s signals. Yawning frequently or feeling mentally foggy are cues from your body that you need a rest. Instead of pushing through with caffeine or other stimulants, take a power nap or a short break.
That first arrow you could survive; it’s the second arrow that’s the real killer. That arrow is not the procrastination itself; it’s your emotional reaction to it.
Changing your relationship with procrastination starts with a more accurate understanding of its true nature. Thanks to scientific research, we now know that procrastination is not a moral failure; it’s a listening failure. And this is why trying to “beat” procrastination is worse than ineffective. It’s counterproductive.
Whenever you’re procrastinating, ask yourself whether it’s coming from the head, the heart, or the hand: Head: “Is the task appropriate?” Heart: “Is the task exciting?” Hand: “Is the task doable?”
It’s important to notice when we use learning as procrastination in disguise. Sometimes what we think is a lack of skills really is a lack of self-assurance. Reading books or listening to podcasts on the subject won’t help until you apply the knowledge to the task you have been putting off.
What happens when your head, heart, and hand are perfectly aligned, and still you find yourself procrastinating? It might be time to consider whether the problem lies not within you but within the system in which you operate.
As you become adept at hearing its message, procrastination ceases to be a barrier to productivity and becomes a gateway to self-discovery.
Intentional imperfection isn’t about settling for less or not trying your best. Much like the Italians know they can’t make some of the best wine and also make the best corks to close the bottles, intentional imperfection means being deliberate about where you invest your efforts, recognizing that you cannot be at the very top all the time and across all areas of life. It’s about striving for sustainable excellence rather than fleeting perfection.
It may seem surprisingly simple, but the essence of intentional imperfection is accepting your limitations: you cannot expect to simultaneously excel at every target you set for yourself.
Accepting that not everything has to be perfect leads to a less pressured yet more fulfilling life. Unattainable standards are replaced with a heightened focus on what matters. Frustration turns into calm exploration. Setbacks become creative constraints.
When you start looking, you will notice many of our greatest achievements can be traced back to such iterative cycles of trial and error.
But we in the present day have largely lost those quiet natural pauses. Instead, we grind on a near-constant flood of social media and emails. This leaves little space for thinking, let alone thinking about thinking.
The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind.
What if you could feel that burst of inspiration every week? That is the usefulness of Plus Minus Next. Without much effort, you can have a moment of reflection that will inspire you to take actions that will improve your life. Take a look at what you did last week, reflect on it, and take a better step this week.”
Change is unintentional; adaptation is accidental. But there is so much to learn from our mistakes; we should learn to fall in love with them.
You can download a printable Plus Minus Next template here: https://nesslabs.com/pmn.
Our economy is built not on the notion of enough but on the notion of more.
In medieval guilds, where mastering a skill and producing high-quality goods were highly valued, the focus was on maintaining a standard of excellence rather than constant growth. And
When you’re not playing a game of leveling up and chasing linear goals, persistence—showing up consistently over a long period of time, long enough that you can start seeing the compound interest in your work—can be a powerful differentiator.
Be iterative, not dogmatic: approach this process with the humility of a scientist, not the rigidity of an officer following orders.
Waltzing with chaos isn’t just about survival—it’s about feeling alive and open to the world, welcoming change as a source of growth, and finding humor in life’s trickiest moments.
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.
