Name: You don’t need a 10-year plan. You need to experiment. | Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T22:22:33.000Z
Duration: 18 min 53 s
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We're all staring at a giant leaderboard with social media where we can see how other people are progressing their success.

Reflexive pronouns

Where we keep on comparing ourselves to each other, asking, is this person being faster?

This creates toxic productivity when we overwork ourselves just trying to climb those ladders as quickly as possible.

We feel like if we manage to be successful, then we'll be happy.

Because of that, we try to build systems, we try to stick to routines, and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process.

But when you ask happy people how they discovered their passion, and if they give you an honest answer, they'll tell you they stumbled upon it.

What we can learn from that is that finding your purpose in life is not really about seeking it, obsessing over it, or applying a plan, but instead it's about following your curiosity, experimenting, exploring, trying new things, and trusting that you will figure out what is the thing that makes you excited to wake up in the morning.

I'm a neuroscientist and the author of Tiny Experiments, How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

A lot of us are currently experiencing cognitive overload, and there are many reasons for that.

The world is changing fast, and we're trying to hoard as much information as possible to understand what's going on around us.

We're trying to be as productive as possible in order to keep up, again, with this world that keeps on changing.

In essence, there is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved.

They're still the same that they were thousands of years ago.

This creates anxiety because we keep asking ourselves, how am I doing?

Tiny Experiments offer an alternative to this maximalist approach, where instead of going for the bigger thing, you go for the thing that is most likely to bring you discovery, fun, enjoyment, and that is based on your curiosity rather than an external definition of success.

A linear model of success is based on a fixed outcome that we try to get to.

It implies that first you do A, then B, then C, and then you'll be successful.

There are lots of problems with a linear model of success.

One of them is that it assumes that you know where you're going, which might not always be the case.

Another one is the assumption that wherever you want to go right now is where you will want to go in a few years from now.

Our world is evolving, and you should allow yourself to change the direction of your ambitions with the world as the world changes.

There's a famous quote that has been attributed to a lot of different psychologists, including Viktor Frankl, and that says that our freedom lies within the gap between stimulus and response.

What that means is that whenever we find ourselves in a situation or whenever we face a trigger, there is a little gap between that trigger and our response, and in that gap lies the freedom to make a choice.

Are we going to go for the automatic response, the one we have no control over, or are we going to pause and ask ourselves, how do I want to respond to this situation?

Whenever we face a disruption in our life, it's very tempting to try and immediately solve the actual problems that arise from that disruption.

We completely ignore the emotional experience.

Affective labeling means labeling your emotions.

It really just means putting words to feelings, and it's incredibly helpful because it allows you to better connect and understand your emotions so you can manage them better.

This allows us to reduce activity in the amygdala, which is involved in unconscious emotional processing, and to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in rational thinking.

It's really just about picking a word to describe your current emotion, and if you can't find the right word, there is research showing that describing a landscape is also a great way to practice affective labeling.

So you could say, for example, that it's a stormy day over a dark forest, or it's a scary cliff over a beautiful sea.

This practice is particularly useful for people who like to feel like they're in control.

When your mind is clear, when you have processed the emotions, you will be able to think about the actual consequences in a more efficient way.

A mindset is a default way of seeing the world, and our mindsets influence so many things in our lives.

They influence our decisions, they influence the way we think, they influence our relationships, and even the way we feel.

Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want versus being on autopilot.

There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy conscious lives.

These three mindsets are called the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset, and the perfectionist mindset.

You can picture those three subconscious mindsets on the four by four metrics where the two different factors are curiosity and ambition.

The cynical mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we're actually sometimes even making fun of earnest people who still have this high level of curiosity and ambition.

So things that we might be doing instead is doom scrolling, sitting on the sofa, going through negative news, and then maybe even spending a lot of time and energy discussing and debating those negative news with other people.

In the escapist mindset, we're still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions.

We're trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities.

That can take the form of retail therapy, binge watching, or dream planning, or next vacation, instead of doing something right now to change our lives.

In the perfectionist mindset, we have high ambition, but low curiosity.

We try to escape uncertainty through work.

We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful, then we'll be happy.

But you have decided to let go of your curiosity.

Those mindsets are actually very fluid, and they might change depending on our situation and different triggers and different ambitions that we might have at the moment.

These mindsets are not fixed personality traits.

There is an alternative, which is called the experimental mindset, where your curiosity and your ambition are both high.

Instead of chasing those linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you're open to designing experiments.

Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from.

If you keep on repeating the same trial and everything works as expected, it means that you're not growing, you're not learning anything.

All scientists know that real growth requires both trial and error.

It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don't know what's coming.

It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected.

The idea of cultivating an experimental mindset is based on the scientific method.

First, you start by observing your current situation, by looking at the world around you.

Then you ask a research question and you design a tiny experiment to collect data, which you can then analyze.

But to design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity.

A great way to do this is to design what I call a pact.

This is a commitment to the fact where you say, I am going to run this experiment and perform this action for this specific duration.

This is something that you need to be able to do right now.

This is something you can try straight away.

And what's great is that when each pact you design has purpose imbued into it, you don't need to have a grand purpose in life.

I highly encourage you while you're running your pact to take little notes.

Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your pact as is because it works for you.

You can also pause it if you feel like that's not really something you want to keep going with.

Or you can pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation.

Curiosity keeps you adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world.

It ensures that you stay open to new possibilities.

And frankly, it just makes life more fun.

This all might sound philosophical, but there's actually a lot of neuroscientific research showing that when we experience thirst for water, the same parts of the brain activate than when we experience thirst for information.

So when we say, I'm thirsty for knowledge, I want to learn more, I want to know more, we couldn't be more right.

The problem today is that it's become really, really hard to know the difference between information and knowledge.

And by consuming all of this information, we might actually not take action to go in the real world and collect our own data, our own knowledge that would be much more helpful in order to make our own decisions.

Like sticking to the safe path, the more obvious one, where we feel like we understand all of the parameters.

Or sometimes that could even look like doing nothing because we're too afraid to do something dangerous.

Research shows that when we experience uncertainty, our neural activity intensifies.

Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty.