I was listening to a recent episode of All The Hacks, Chris Hutchins’ personal finance and life optimization podcast, and his guest was Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist, former Google executive, and founder of the Ness Labs newsletter. She was talking about her new book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, and her ideas around ditching goals and focusing on experiments really resonated with me. I haven’t read her book yet, but the above linked episode was worth a listen.
I’ve read a lot of books about habits and goal-setting. I’m a fan of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I also really like BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits. I’ve written about both recently. These are great books with genuinely useful frameworks. But Le Cunff is doing something different and I think it fills a gap that neither of those books quite addresses.
What Is a Tiny Experiment?
The core idea behind Tiny Experiments is a reframe of how we think about goals altogether. Most of us approach our lives and ambitions linearly: we set a goal, map a path, and then measure our success or failure against whether we hit it. Four-year college degrees. Ten-year career plans. Thirty-year mortgages. We’re actually just patterning our goals after tried and true paths that someone else has taken. We’re trained to think in straight lines.
And, let’s be honest, most of us don’t hit every goal. Most of us don’t hit half our goals.
Le Cunff argues that life doesn’t actually work that way and that this mismatch between how we plan and what happens in real life is the source of a lot of unnecessary suffering. Goals breed fear of failure and encourage toxic productivity that sets us up to feel like we’re falling short even when we’re doing interesting, valuable things.
The alternative is the tiny experiment: a purposeful, actionable, time-bounded, and trackable thing you do to learn something about yourself, about what you enjoy, and about what works. Like committing to writing a newsletter every week for a set number of weeks. The experiment has a built-in end point. You’re not committing to a new identity forever. You’re just running a test to see what you discover.
Uncertainty, Le Cunff says, can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis, rather than something to be feared or optimized away. That’s a meaningful shift. Instead of asking “what are my goals?” you ask “what am I curious about?” Instead of “did I succeed or fail?” you ask “what did I learn?”
How Is This Different from Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits?
This is the question I kept turning over, because on the surface these ideas sound similar. Small actions. Consistent repetition. Incremental progress. So what’s actually different?
Here’s how I’d draw the distinction:
Atomic Habits (James Clear) is about the mechanics of building and maintaining habits. Clear’s framework is a system for making a behavior automatic. The assumption is that you already know what habit you want to build. The book tells you how to build it. It’s a behavioral engineering manual, and it’s excellent.
Tiny Habits (BJ Fogg) operates similarly. It’s about shrinking a desired behavior down to its smallest possible form so it can attach to an existing routine. Again, you generally know the destination. Fogg gives you a method to start moving toward it without overwhelming yourself.
Tiny Experiments (Anne-Laure Le Cunff) is asking a more fundamental question: what if you don’t yet know what you want? What if the goal itself needs to be discovered, not just pursued? Le Cunff isn’t teaching you how to build a habit. She’s teaching you how to design your life like a scientist, with curiosity, iteration, and a willingness to learn from whatever happens, including the experiments that don’t go the way you expected.
The other meaningful difference is the relationship to failure. In a habit framework, not following through feels like a failure. In the tiny experiment framework, an experiment that reveals something you don’t enjoy isn’t a failure, it’s data. Le Cunff talks about running an experiment where she puts out a YouTube video weekly for a couple of months. While the external data was good (lots of subscribers, clicks, etc), she hated it. And learning that about herself was worth a pile of click-through gold. A successful experiment can point you away from something just as easily as it points you towards something.
What Tiny Experiments Have Looked Like in My Life
When I heard Le Cunff describe this framework, I realized two things.
- I should run some deliberate, tiny experiments.
- I actually have run some tiny experiments in the past and they are useful.
The most obvious one is this blog. Around three years ago, I started writing a weekly post. Not because I had a ten-year content strategy and not because I was committed to becoming a writer forever. I was curious whether I liked writing longer-form pieces, consistently. Did I have things to say? Would the weekly discipline of putting thoughts into a structured format feel rewarding or like a chore?
What I discovered: I loved it. I’m clearly still writing. The experiment revealed something true about me. And that information eventually led to writing my first book, and now I’m in the editing stage of my second. None of that happens without the experiment of just starting to write, week after week, to see what would happen.
Teaching my Capstone Course at UW-Madison started out as an experiment too. I committed to one semester, 26 students, and 3 corporate partners. If it tanked, we could end the course or try something new. I didn’t know if I’d like teaching weekly, or the prep work involved, or working with students. But it was worth a try. It turns out I do enjoy all of that (especially the students!) and that class has been a big part of my life ever since.
These are experiments that worked out. But I’ve run plenty that didn’t — coffees I thought I wanted to have regularly that turned out to be not worth repeating and projects I thought would energize me that quickly revealed themselves as wrong fits (marketing – bleh). In Le Cunff’s framework, those aren’t failures. They’re the experiments that led me to the things I really enjoy. They clear out time for the stuff that really matters.
Tiny Experiments in Other People’s Lives
Le Cunff’s podcast talk is full of examples from people who used this approach in ways both big and small.
She, herself, was a successful Google executive when she got burned out and curious about neuroscience. Le Cunff didn’t quit her job and enroll in a PhD program on day one. She started small: reading, exploring, and testing her own interest. Eventually the experiments compounded into a genuine path change. She now holds a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from King’s College London and runs one of the most thoughtful newsletters on the internet. That trajectory started with curiosity and tiny steps, not a grand plan.
And think about all of the people who experiment with working for themselves before fully committing and quitting their day jobs. Instead of quitting on Day 1 and putting a tremendous amount of pressure of your new business, a tiny experiment might be “I’m going to take one freelance project this month to see if I actually like this kind of work.” The experiment is bounded, low-stakes, and genuinely informative. Most people who make big life changes successfully didn’t leap, they experimented their way there.
Why This Matters for Intentional Living
This tiny experiment framework is incredibly valuable for people trying to live more intentionally: it gives you a structured, low-pressure way to keep discovering who you are and what you actually want, at any stage of life.
Intentional living, at its core, is about making choices that align with your values and your genuine self. But that requires self-knowledge. Self-knowledge isn’t something you acquire once and carry forever. It evolves. You evolve. The person you were at 35 may have genuinely different interests and needs than the person you are at 45 or 55. What worked before may not be what works now.
Tiny experiments are how you stay in touch with that evolving self. They’re how you keep learning about what lights you up, what depletes you, what you’re capable of, and what kind of life feels most alive to you. Not through introspection alone, but through action, reflection, and honest assessment of what the experiment revealed.
As Le Cunff frames it, success is the lifelong experiment of discovering what makes you feel most alive. I love that definition. It takes the pressure off any single goal and puts the emphasis where it belongs: on a life of ongoing, curious engagement with what’s possible.
Try A Tiny Experiment
If you’re intrigued, get started now. Design one tiny experiment this week. It should be something you’re genuinely curious about, something small enough to actually do, and something you can run for a defined period like four weeks, eight weeks, or whatever feels right.
Write it down like a scientist would: “I’m going to do X, every Y, for Z weeks, to learn whether [hypothesis].” Then do it. Keep track of the outcome and how you feel. Then, look honestly at what you found out.
You might be surprised where the data leads you.