📗 On Testing Hypotheses Instead of Setting Goals

A review of "Tiny Experiments" by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I picked up Tiny Experiments on a whim. Yes, that’s an affiliate link, yes I hope you buy the book, the whole point of this essay is going to be “this is genuinely the best self-help—sorry, Personal Success in Business—book I’ve ever read.” Long-time readers of this newsletter may notice that I don’t say that sort of thing very often.

I’ve been aware of Anne-Laure Le Cunff for a long time — it’s impossible to be involved in the personal knowledge management community without hearing of Ness Labs. But I’ve never particularly considered myself a fan — we run in adjacent circles but I’ve never had much reason to go dig deep into the resources she offers, although the few essays I’ve read from Ness Labs, I’ve liked.

When it comes to advice about living well, I tend to take a raven’s approach: I collect shiny ideas and synthesize them into something that works for me — which is typically an idiosyncratic system highly optimized for my unique circumstances. I rarely endorse specific approaches, productivity systems, or even software. But the core idea behind Tiny Experiments — that we should let go of toxic productivity, that we should get away from the paradigm of “setting goals” and embrace the paradigm of “running small experiments,” really appeals to me in a way that I think would benefit anyone from small children to business leaders to retirees.

It doesn’t condescend. It doesn’t lean on a brave story of overcoming a learning disability. Anne-Laure’s approach is that of a scientist (genuinely — she’s a neuroscientist) doing science in the old-fashioned sense of “identifying problems, making hypotheses, running experiments, and seeing what happens.”

The book shares a diverse pile of interesting anecdotes that have real depth and are always relevant from a storytelling perspective instead of feeling like they’re slapped on as a form of social proof, a “look see my system totally works!” Anne-Laure is, bluntly, a better writer than a lot of folks I’ve come across. There are no superficial emotional bludgeons in this book. It’s very warm, forgiving but also disciplined.

Fundamentally, Tiny Experiments offers a way to reframe goal setting in a way that sidesteps counterproductive emotions like shame not because they aren’t legitimate but because they aren’t helpful.

I totally get why all the giants in this space — Ryder Carrol, Tiago Forte, Ali Abdaal, etc. — added their voices to the chorus of endorsements on the cover. It really is excellent.

Oh, not everything was applicable to me. My background is different from Anne-Laure’s — I’m not the kind of tiger-mom’d overachiever she seems to be directing the most targeted of her advice toward. I was a fairly self-directed learner from an early age, my parents trusted me to do what I needed to do, and while I had some bumps along the way (I was wildly unprepared for the memorization required in my L1 year civil procedure class) my life has worked out pretty well¹. I’ve just never been particularly ambitious.

At one point, Anne-Laure posits that not knowing where to start is the biggest barrier for most people. This may be a bubble effect, but in my own life and that of my friends, the problem isn’t not knowing what to do, it’s not getting off my butt to do it! Take exercise: I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, I’ve done years of physical therapy, but actually doing it is sooooo hard. Much harder than, e.g., writing a 1,700 word essay. Gym grades never mattered, yanno?

There’s a lovely chapter of Tiny Experiments devoted to procrastination. One of my favorite lines was:

The problem with procrastination is not that you’re being lazy. The problem is that you’ve shot the messenger.

The key is, as I’ve written about myself, metacognition. Paying attention to what your body and mind are telling you is key. Interpreting these signals is hard, of course. I often yawn when I’m hungry, and or feel tempted to nap when an iron pill or walk would serve me better. But attempting to power through that niggling “don’t wanna” feeling can sometimes be as unwise (or necessary, depending on the circumstances!) as popping a percocet so you can finish a marathon.

But when I find myself stuck writing an article, or unenthusiastic about dinner, or reluctant to exercise, typically “powering through” results in significantly worse results than taking a moment and really thinking (critically, carefully) about what is interfering with my enthusiasm, and then taking steps to mitigate those unconscious concerns. Time with a physical trainer is as expensive as a piano lesson, and but investing in my health is something I should be happy to do instead of ashamed of needing. When I really crave milk instead of water, there’s probably some kind of dietary deficiency driving it (babies wreck your bones, yo). When I’m bored writing something, y’all are generally more bored reading it :P

Anne-Laure is right: sticking to the plan is often the wrong call!

In his wonderful newsletter Experimental History,

Adam Mastroianni

exhorts us to build a fleet and change the world, a lovely metaphor for doing small scale independent science instead of Big Safe Science.

the best way to explore is to have many ships going in all different directions, not one ship that can only go in one direction. Some of those ships will end up going in circles or crashing into reefs or getting blown over in storms. People on one ship will often think the people on the other ships are wasting their time: “You’re heading to the Gulf of Aden? You fools, there’s nothing to learn there!” But if one ship discovers something—a new island, a new kind of fish, a new passage between continents—and sends out a signal, now everybody knows about it. That’s what strong-link science looks like.

I thought of Adam often while reading Tiny Experiments, because although Adam’s point is more about doing science from a “making discoveries about the world” perspective and Anne-Laure is talking about a way of looking at the “science” in a much more personal way, the attitude is very similar.

Also from Adam:

getting good at identifying interesting problems, gathering data on them, and writing up your findings in accessible language is a pretty marketable and widely applicable skill

Widely applicable indeed.

Anne-Laure’s whole point is that the scientific method of notice a problem, make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, evaluate the results is extremely useful for figuring out our own lives. A beautiful reframing that reminds me of that mental click of “oh, duh,” when I realized that a “to be read” pile should not be viewed as an ever-growing task list of obligations but rather a curated list of things worth reading when I’m ready for something new.

I also appreciated that some of her ancillary advice was about the importance of movement, sleep, and moments of quiet contemplation. She has gentle pushback on framings like the 4k weeks of the ~average human life because some moments matter more than others, some moments stretch out or speed up or are simply impactful.

Reframing our lives not as a series of time blocks in which we have limited opportunities to get things done is important for living anything resembling a good life. The moments when I make my one-year-old daughter giggle are not interchangeable blocks on a board. An investment in my long-term health doesn’t translate well to a checkbox.

I was reminded of a William Blake poem, which I first heard in a Lara Croft movie:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

The world needs more of that. More moments to read old poetry² because reading for betterment doesn’t always mean academic treatises or self-help books (though I enjoy both). One can be curious about a wide variety of things, and having curiosity as a driver instead of a pathological need to “be productive” is a much nicer way to start the day and, paradoxically, often more productive.

The optimal number of mistakes is not zero.

Further Reading

• I live-tweeted (most of) my reactions to Tiny Experiments, which again you can purchase via this affiliate link if you want — I get a (very) small kickback. Click through if you want to see a bunch of photos of my handwritten annotations, my conversation with Anne-Laure, and my tips & tricks for hosting small gatherings.

• As I was reacting to the “the biggest barrier is not knowing what to do” and reflecting on the difference between being an overachiever and, well, somebody like me, always happy to take the “B” if it meant not doing make-up work for days I was out sick, I was reminded of my article about What it Means to Not Have Time and how different people mean different things by can’t.

• For more of my thoughts on metacognition, check out my article about Building a Habit of Checking In with the Bigger Picture.

1. I say “no huge lows” but I should note that I’m a suicide survivor; I attribute that particular low to a bad reaction to birth control. The next-worst moments in my life were a breakup that caught me by surprise, and the week I realized that I could not continue teaching and having any sense of self-respect. I think it’s fine to say those aren’t particularly “huge” although they were indeed “lows.”

2. I’m partial to Lovelace’s To Althea, From Prison, Kipling’s Cold Iron, and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot… although I’m Marylander enough that my only tattoo — “quaff this kind nepenthe” — is from Poe’s The Raven.