A practical guide to making the most of your life

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, you moved to San Francisco and quickly rose through the ranks at Google, becoming the global lead on digital health projects. Yet at age 27, you decided to call it quits. Why?

Coming from Paris to Silicon Valley felt like going to a very special place where everything was happening very fast. I felt very fortunate and learned a lot, very rapidly, but at the same time, the definition of success in Silicon Valley was already very codified. I felt like I had this perfectly mapped journey in front of me - and I started losing interest. There was no wondering where to go and what to do next.

Even your mother was shocked that you resigned. Most people would think you had it made, with a clear career path ahead. But you argue in your book that there's another way. Can you describe it?

The traditional route is a linear approach to success, where you go through certain steps in a fixed order, usually with gatekeepers telling you when you're allowed to move onto the next rung on the ladder. The alternative is an experimental approach, where you follow your curiosity to discover what you want to work on next, and what you want to explore. Instead of clinging to the illusion of certainty that you know where you're going, you embrace the uncertainty, the discovery process. You end up designing a career that is uniquely yours, instead of copy-pasting a blueprint of success from other people.

Let's say I'm a management type and don't consider myself a very creative person. How do I start experimenting?

Take a person who works for a company and wants to launch a newsletter. If you used the traditional approach to goal-setting, you'd say: "Let's launch this newsletter, and we want to have 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year." That's a linear goal based on a fixed, predetermined outcome, with a binary definition of success or failure. If you took an experimental approach and designed a tiny experiment instead, you'd aim to write one newsletter every week until the end of the year to learn as much as possible in the process. You wouldn't say how many subscribers you were going to reach, because you'd have no idea what was going to work and what wasn't. 

Honestly, doesn't that sound extremely vague?

No. You're approaching the challenge like a scientist. When a scientist starts an experiment, they actually don't know the outcome. Their only aim is to learn something new. Designing a tiny experiment will let you create a playground or a sandbox to collect your own data and reflect on what worked and what didn't.

You advise people to start these types of limited experiments with a "pact". What is that?

A pact is a mini protocol for experimentation. It's a commitment to curiosity. The format is very simple, it's "I will [insert action] for [insert duration]." This contains exactly the same ingredients that a scientist uses when designing an experiment. You need to know what you're going to test, and for how many trials. 

Pacts can work in a professional setting, but they also work for any other area of your life. Say you've never meditated before and you're curious about meditation, you could say, "I will meditate every morning for the next two weeks," and see what happens. Or maybe you want to try going for a walk at lunchtime every day for the next three weeks, and note the effect.

Scientists keep detailed logs. Do we have to do this for our personal experiments?

What's important is that you commit to collecting the data and withholding judgment until you're done, just like a scientist doesn't start poking at the data in the middle of the experiment. At the end, you can ask yourself, "Did I enjoy this? What kind of impact did it have? Did I sleep better? Did I feel better? Do I feel less stressed?"

Whatever it is, experiments need time. How do people do this when they're already feeling stressed out?

That's why they're called tiny experiments. The idea is to keep them very, very small. There's no point being ambitious and after one week, you feel like it's too much, and you stop. You can conduct experiments for as few as five days. It's also not true that it requires more time, because a tiny experiment can involve doing something you already do just in a slightly different way, like trying a different approach to running meetings.

Let's assume I keep my pact and withhold judgment. One week later, I sit down and try to make sense of the results. And then?

It depends a little bit on the length of the experiment. In the book, I share a very simple tool that allows you to review your experiments, which I call "plus-minus-next". It has three columns, with "plus" for everything that went well, "minus" for everything that didn't go so well, and "next" for what you might want to tweak in the next iteration. 

It allows you to create growth loops so that whatever happened with the experiment, you can learn from it and apply the lessons to the next version. For bigger decisions I recommend a steering sheet, which asks you to consider both the internal and external signals of success.

How do those two ways of keeping track differ?

The sheet is about meta cognition, or the ability to observe our own thoughts, to reflect on our own behaviours and thought processes and emotions, in a way that is uniquely human. We're normally very good at seeing the external signals of success. At work, we might look at how much money we made with a product launch, or how many subscribers we got. But we rarely spend enough time looking at the internal signals: how did that actually feel? Because if you made a lot of money at work but you actually hated working on the project - is that really success and something you want to continue with? Probably not.

You make a powerful argument that following a linear path is not the only way to go through life. But what does a long string of many, many tiny experiments amount to in the end? Don't humans want to leave a legacy, some big accomplishment?

It's a fallacy to think that it all needs to add up to something big. We're obsessed with the idea of building a legacy, but what's more important is to focus on generativity, by which I mean the impact you can have right now on the people around you. Tiny experiments let you focus on the little things you can tweak and iterate immediately, instead of obsessing over the "big idea" that everybody will talk about in 300 years. When you keep going through the cycles of experimentation and grow through them, it will add up to a lot of significant change around you and in your community - while you're still alive.

About Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is the founder of Ness Labs and a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's Collage London. She swapped the tech world for the study of mental health, creativity, and productivity through the lens of a neuroscientist. She is the founder of Ness Labs, a platform and community dedicated to "mindful productivity", which explores personal development and sustainable work habits. Le Cunff is also the author of "Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World," published in 2025.