Tiny Experiments

How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

Hardcover, 304 pages

English language

Published March 4, 2025 by Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN:
9780593715130
Goodreads:
214268997

View on OpenLibrary

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"I loved this profound, practical, and generous book."—Oliver Burkeman

A transformative guide to rethinking our approach to goals, creativity, and life itself from a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, and the creator of the popular Ness Labs newsletter

Life isn’t linear, and yet we constantly try to mold it around linear goals: four-year college degrees, ten-year career plans, thirty-year mortgages. What if instead we approached life as a giant playground for experimentation? Based on ancestral philosophy and the latest scientific research, Tiny Experiments provides a desperately needed reframing: Uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis.

Neuroscientist and entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff reveals that all you need is an experimental mindset to turn challenges into self-discovery and doubt into opportunity. Readers will replace the old linear model of success with a circular model of growth in which goals are discovered, pursued, and adapted—not in a vacuum, but …

2 editions

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I selected this book because of the idea the title suggests: making tiny changes instead of big ones, so I can improve annoying processes without messing up the ones that work well.

A concept like that had been on my mind before I started reading. I found valuable additional thoughts in this book.

I have run a few tiny experiments by now and they work nicely for me. E.g. I developed a 3 min neck and shoulder exercise that I actually do regularly, because it is tiny and simple and it seems to solve the problem it was meant to solve. (After about a month I can't be sure, of course.)

I was less interested in the chapters that did not directly relate to tiny experiments and just skimmed over a few as I usually do with ambitious, somewhat bloated self help books.

Subjects

  • Nonfiction
  • Psychology
  • Productivity
  • Personal Development