Tiny Experiments Quotes

“As Adam Grant puts it, “The clearest sign of intellectual chemistry isn’t agreeing with someone. It’s enjoying your disagreements with them.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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,”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“This is how you discover your life’s meaning—by focusing on your daily actions rather than the content of your future eulogy. When generativity becomes your focus, the immediate impact of your actions is all the motivation you need. Every pact you make, every shift, every “What if?” becomes not just a step in your own journey, but a chance to inspire and elevate others. Your career is no longer a linear ladder you climb alone, but a nonlinear path of shared discovery.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Ride the wave of chaos instead of vainly trying to contain it. The point is not to create a master plan that gives you the illusion of power over the situation; rather, it is to de-escalate the consequences of any setback so you can move forward rather than give up.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Our ancestors’ daily routines included organic opportunities to shape their inner world—on long walks, in meditative moments while completing repetitive tasks such as sewing and tending to crops, or in nightly reflection when praying before bed. 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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“We fancy ourselves adept multitaskers, but studies show that our performance drops dramatically when we attempt to focus on more than one thing at a time. That’s because the human brain has an attentional bottleneck impacting both perception and action. In short, our efforts to get more done actually slow us down.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Keeping track of your energy levels is an easy way to start managing your physical resources better. For a week or two, make a note of your energy levels at different times of the day so you can identify your energy peaks and troughs.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“It’s about striving for sustainable excellence rather than fleeting perfection.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once said: “One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Whatever the trigger, this toxic form of productivity becomes a hidden motive that influences our choices and actions, pushing us toward constant output while downplaying the value of rest, reflection, and meaningful engagement. Each project needs a clear outcome. Conversations become transactional. So-called unproductive moments of playful curiosity and quiet contemplation where our most profound insights can arise are eliminated. There is no space for the mind to wander and make unexpected connections.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“I call this phenomenon the self-consistency fallacy: the assumption that “I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“The educator and political leader John W. Gardner wrote, “As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Uncertainty becomes fuel for anxiety. In fact, uncertainty has been found to cause more stress than inevitable pain. When we don’t know what’s coming, we overthink every possibility and we conjure worst-case scenarios.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Metacognition might feel uncomfortable at times. It’s easy to write about what went well, regardless of the specifics that led to that success. It is more difficult to write about what went wrong. And it is even harder when, as is sometimes the case, we ourselves must take sole responsibility for why things didn’t go so well.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“When I stopped trying to shoot the messenger—to “just do it” and plow through—then procrastination turned out to be a helpful friend. When I treated resistance as evidence, it helped me to understand why it was so hard to write this chapter in the first place. And once I started talking to people, it became impossible to keep on delaying the work.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“ Writer Tasshin Fogleman makes the distinction between cold curiosity, which is functional and calculating, and burning curiosity, which is feverish and irrational. Your pact should sit in the in-between: warm curiosity, the kind that both pragmatically aligns with your existing interests and fiercely drives you to explore new ones.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Since then, researchers have expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions, and decision-making—from work to relationships and education—giving rise to a branch of cognitive science known as Cognitive Script Theory.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“French philosopher Rene 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.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“This process of deliberate reflection resulted in the creation of his 3-2-1 newsletter—three ideas from James, two quotes from others, and one question for the reader to ponder—a much shorter format that has now amassed millions of readers.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World