Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

Let’s be honest: Nobody really wants to live a productive life. We want to express ourselves, connect with others, and explore the world. Productivity is just a means to those ends; it should certainly not come at the expense of actually living life.

Notice the specific number of repetitions. Committing in advance to a specific duration for your experiment has an obvious advantage: it forces you to wait until after a pre-agreed number of iterations before making a decision.

Repeated trials are an essential feature of experiments. You need enough trials to obtain results you can trust.

Are you following your past or discovering your path? Are you following the crowd or discovering your tribe? Are you following your passion or discovering your curiosity

Trackable. Notice I don’t say measurable here. Performance metrics can make you focus on the outcome. Instead, you should be able to track your pact with a binary question: Have you done it or not? Yes or no? This makes your progress easy to monitor.

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. Although we would like to relinquish control and soar through the skies, we often find ourselves suffering from Response 1: uneasin

Kairos moments, like pêche à pied, are what I call magic windows: those periods of creative flow that often occur when we are immersed in activities that capture our full attention, when we spend time with loved ones, or when we are engaged in self-reflection.

All these approaches to goal setting are based on linear goals: they were created for controlled environments that lend to readily measurable outcomes with predictable timelines.

The journey to collective curiosity does not have to be overwhelming. Start with small steps that feel comfortable. Intentionally nurture your existing relationships. Contribute your skills and experiences to communities you already belong to. Move at your own pace, listen to your needs, and incrementally make the commitments that fit this season o