Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
A transformative guide to rethinking your approach to goals, creativity, and life itself from a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and creator of the popular Ness Labs newsletter.
Clear, practical, inspiring. This book will change the way you design your goals and live your life.
Nir Eyal
Author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
This book is your permission slip to live life on your own terms, guided by curiosity.
Melody Wilding
Author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work
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10 things the book will teach you
- Be comfortable with ambiguity despite your brain screaming for certainty
- Discover your true ambitions through conducting tiny personal experiments
- Reframe anxieties around life’s “in-between” as opportunities for growth
-
Let go of unhelpful beliefs about success that
have been holding you back -
Stop seeing procrastination as your enemy and
turn it into a compass to take action
- Overcome setbacks with grace and resilience
-
Make choices that truly reflect your own
ambitions and no one else’s - Overcome the fear of what others think by learning in public
- Have the toolset to always be able to navigate any big decisions in your career and life
- Stop stressing about finding your purpose and start living instead
“I loved this profound, practical, and generous book. Through the ingenious lens of the tiny experiment, Anne-Laure Le Cunff shows how we can jettison arduous and dispiriting attempts at self-improvement in favor of achievable and energizing adventures on the path to a more vibrant, accomplished, and wholehearted life.”
“The fear of failure often stands in the way of learning from trial-and-error. This is a thought-provoking guide to doing more trials and making fewer errors.”
“In Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff shows how to separate ambition from rigid linear goals; allowing uncertainty to bloom into possibility and a meaningful life to emerge organically. A compelling new take on a timeless concern.”
It’s time to 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 in conversation with the larger world.
Tiny Experiments offers not just practical tools to make sure your most vital work gets done, but a guide to reawakening your curiosity and drive in a noisy, busy, disaffected world, so that you can discover and pursue your most authentic ambitions while making a meaningful contribution.
Praise for Tiny Experiments
★★★★★
Author of Feel Good Productivity
“Whether you’re looking to improve your health, career, or creativity, Tiny Experiments is a powerful guide to embracing curiosity and developing an experimental mindset. Instead of big changes, this book encourages testing small tweaks that lead to lasting growth. Perfect for anyone seeking more freedom in how they design their life.”
★★★★★
Author of Fluentish and Creator of Jo Club
“The urge to start experimenting will hit you around page 2, and it just builds from there. Tiny Experiments is not only inspiring, but also a tangible playbook to break past the status quo of our overwhelmed generation and create a unique, exciting, and aligned path. Get ready to quit the unfulfilling job, make a pivot, and grab the experimental reigns of your life.”
★★★★★
Author of The Good Enough Job
“An essential handbook for our modern era—an era defined not by linear definitions of success, but by the squiggles and swerves necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Tiny Experiments will fundamentally alter how you think about and live your life.”
★★★★★
Founder of Linking Your Thinking
“A supremely inspiring and practical book. Anne-Laure upends the idea of success as a sequence of linear steps and replaces it with a wildly compelling thesis: life is a series of experiments and you are the lead scientist.”
★★★★★
Founder of Bonfire with Soul
“Anne-Laure has the unique capacity to cut through the tangled barb wire of existence and invite us into a new way of being. In a world desirous of predictive outcomes and the comfort of knowing, she is the gentle tap on the shoulder that suggests there is another path. Tiny Experiments is a gift for all of those yearning to feel alive and free.”
★★★★★
Co-authors of No Hard Feelings
“A must read for anyone who struggles with uncertainty (most of us humans!). This intelligent and actionable book offers new tools for how to learn from and even collaborate with uncertainty.”
★★★★★
Author of The Pathless Path
“Tiny Experiments is one of the first books I’ve read that goes far beyond critiquing the flaws with the modern default path of work. Instead of repeating tropes on the rat race and corporate world, she goes deeper, daring us to imagine a more expansive form of ambition—one not built on what might impress others, but what will help us build a life worth living.”
★★★★★
Author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies
“Full of practical, no-B.S. tips for anyone ready to create their own version of success. Not the version that’s been handed to you with a side of shoulds and expectations, but the one you’re truly curious about. This book is the nudge we all need to live a more playful, experimental life – and isn’t that what we’re really here for?”
★★★★★
Creator of Nervous System Mastery
“Philosophical yet deeply practical. In Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff offers us a perennial prescription for transforming our doubts into experiments, our uncertainty into generative adventures, our fear into curiosity—and perhaps most valuable of all, a thoughtfully crafted permission slip to step out of our comfort zone and into the life we were born to live.”
★★★★★
Psychologist and Entrepreneur
“Humans are naturally curious—to deny this is to deny what makes us unique and what makes us fully come alive. In Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure not only gives you permission to embrace your curiosity, she equips you with powerful evidence-based tools to use it to create a fulfilling life fueled by continual experimentation.”
★★★★★
Author and Creator of the Bullet Journal
“Anne-Laure has the credentials of a scientist, the eye of a poet, and the heart of a child at play. Tiny Experiments synthesizes these qualities together into a powerful philosophy for transforming work to play. Easily one of the best productivity books that I’ve read. Rigorously researched, deeply delightful, and powerfully practical, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to make the most of their life.”
★★★★★
Founder and Author of Building a Second Brain
“Anne-Laure has spent years intensively studying and testing a wide variety of tools, frameworks, and perspectives for making sense of the overwhelming flood of information we are faced with every day. In this book she puts them together into a coherent and actionable toolkit for using that information to craft a life so unique that it could only belong to you.”
★★★★★
Author of The Learning Game
“A compelling case for an experimental mindset, this book is a call to action for anyone ready to explore life through the lens of curiosity.”
★★★★★
Researcher and Author of Smoke and Mirrors
“Tiny Experiments gifts you inspiration, encouragement and permission to indulge in your curiosity and start something new. Crucially, it also gives you the tools to not get carried away and to mindfully explore, build and grow within the context of your own circumstances and ways of being. A must-read for anyone keen to keep their joy and curiosity intact as they play their way through life.”
★★★★★
Writer and Creator of Expanding Awareness
“Weaving together a human-centric philosophy with immediately practicable tools, Anne-Laure opens up a world of experimentation, curiosity and play. Tiny Experiments will help you get unstuck when the going gets tough, nudge you to find perspective when you start to grind, and remind you that you get to decide what success looks like, for you.”
About the Author
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. A former Google executive, she went back to university to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology & Neuroscience from King’s College London. As the founder of Ness Labs and author of its widely read newsletter, she writes about evidence-based ways for people to make the most of their minds, navigate uncertainty, and practice lifelong learning. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed academic journals and mainstream publications such as WIRED, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and more.
International Editions
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