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

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Learning in public unlocks powerful mechanisms to support your personal and professional growth: Get early feedback. Sharing your work in public ensures that what you are working on answering an actual need and allows you to take a more iterative approach. Increase your creativity. By publishing your work in progress, you will increase the likelihood that you will connect the dots between your ideas and other people’s ideas. Clarify your thinking. Instead of just plowing through work, you will be nudged to think about your strategy and execution in a deeper way—another opportunity to practice metacognition. Build your network. Learning in public is a great way to connect with people who are interested in a similar space. It may result in finding a mentor or lead to partnerships. Learn faster. By documenting your progress openly, including your challenges and questions, you can connect with others who have expertise and can suggest resources to build your skills more efficiently.

Like Land, stay focused on your internal metrics of success. Don’t let external expectations command your learning priorities. Instead, maintain a grounded practice aligned with your aspirations. Equally, be ready to listen when you receive constructive feedback.

And if you find yourself in need of a final dose of courage, consider the perspective someone once shared with me moments before I stepped onstage: in a hundred years, you’ll be dead, and so will every single person in the audience. So quit worrying and get out there.

When you leave behind the idea of a fixed vision for your career, you may end up on a path that looks quite wiggly. Each bend brings new experiences, lessons, and opportunities to connect with the world. Your curiosity and the people you meet along the way invite you to venture beyond your comfort zone. Your enduring willingness to adapt becomes yet another superpower in navigating the uncertainties of our world. Finally, by seeking out opportunities to contribute to the world around you, you derive immediate satisfaction and meaning even as the journey takes on a life of its own.

Instead of focusing on what you leave behind, generativity is about what you give now—actively contributing to your community, creating opportunities for others, and sharing your experiences in ways that enable collective growth. Generativity isn’t measured by scale but by the depth of connection in the here and now. It is built around the conversations you have, the positive impact of the work you produce, the lives you touch.

a generative approach is about proactively creating value. Instead of waiting for permission or validation, you can leverage your current resources and skills to produce tangible assets that demonstrate your ability to make a difference.

“Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns,” said entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman.

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you,” wrote Carl Jung.

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.

Forget the finish line. In our quest for personal and professional growth, we often constrain ourselves within the narrow pathways of linear goals. Instead of chasing the next milestone, embrace the liminal and open yourself to a world of possibilities beyond the outcomes you can imagine today. Unlearn your scripts. Since childhood, internalized patterns form cognitive scripts that subtly guide our actions in relationships, work, and education. By unlearning these scripts, you can explore life’s full spectrum of experiences, consider unobvious paths, and nurture your ever-changing curiosity rather than seeking one all-absorbing passion. Turn doubts into experiments. Confidence is built through action. When in doubt, run a personal experiment using a pact—a time-bound commitment to a repeatable action that follows this format: I will [action] for [duration]. You are now the scientist of your own life, with a mindset of openness and curiosity, allowing you to learn from each iteration even if you don’t know the destination. Let go of the chronometer. Shift your focus from Chronos, the quantitative definition of time, to Kairos, which emphasizes the unique quality of each moment. Manage your energy, executive function, and emotions rather than your minutes. Optimize for the depth of experience rather than the speed of achievement. Remember that life is not about how much we do, but how well we do. Make friends with procrastination. Procrastination is not an enemy to be conque...