Tiny Revolutions №119: Becoming the scientist of your own life

An interview with Anne-Laure LeCunff on her new book, Tiny Experiments 🔬

Hello friends! Today I’m sharing something a little different—an interview with neuroscientist

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

about her new book, Tiny Experiments. Beyond excellent taste in titles (haw haw), Anne-Laure and I share a similar spirit of curiosity and playfulness in how we navigate life—and, dare I say it, a bit of healthy skepticism toward the typical goal-oriented way most of us have been conditioned to operate.

It’s exciting to see experimentation becoming more central to conversations about how we navigate uncertainty. Obviously, I’m biased! But I genuinely believe experiments offer us a powerful alternative to the rigid, linear thinking that keeps us trapped in restrictive patterns. They help us reconnect with curiosity, strengthen our ability to adapt to life’s constantly changing conditions, and embrace a way of living that’s more aligned with human nature.

I loved our conversation, and I hope you will too.

SC: About a year and a half ago, I started developing a program called The Fire Inside, which is focused entirely around moving forward in life through conducting experiments. This was inspired by an early experience of mine, getting stumped in a job interview by the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” At the time I was 21 or 22, ambitious but unsure, because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had always learned best through doing things.

I loved reading your book, and I’m curious to hear how you came to embrace this idea of experimenting yourself. Could you talk a bit about what led you to dive into this topic?

ALC: I love how you mentioned learning by doing, because that’s how I loved learning as a kid. But somewhere along the way in my career, I decided that I needed to have a clear plan, a clear vision, and just execute on that. That’s how I approached my work for half my life. I was focused on being successful according to traditional definitions: climbing the corporate ladder, getting the next promotion, and I was pretty good at it.

But at some point, I realized something felt wrong. Even though from the outside I appeared very successful, I felt empty on the inside. That’s when I started questioning the linear path I’d been on. Eventually, I quit my job at Google to join a startup. When that startup didn’t work out, for the first time in my life, I found myself completely lost—without a clear plan, vision, or even a sense of what my next steps should look like.

That experience opened the door for me to start experimenting and exploring. I began asking myself what I wanted to learn about, even if nobody was watching and even if traditional success wasn’t part of the equation. For me, that had always been the brain—why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. So, I decided to go back to university, to graduate school, to study neuroscience. While doing that, I chose to learn publicly. I started a newsletter, writing every week about a topic I’d just discovered, translating scientific insights into practical use cases. That newsletter eventually became a business. I’ve now been writing it for about five years—it’s called Ness Labs.

I finished my graduate studies and now have a PhD in neuroscience. And today, I actually don’t know exactly where I’m going—and it feels great.

It's refreshing to hear you embrace that uncertainty, especially after accomplishing something as significant as publishing a book. Can you walk us through your approach to experiments, and how others might begin?

Yeah, that’s exactly why I shared these two chapters from my life—the first one being very linear and success-oriented, and the second one more exploratory and experimental. This contrast forms the basis of my book and this approach to experimenting.

Instead of clinging to a rigid vision of success, which tends to be binary—either you achieve it or you don’t—you become more like the scientist of your own life. Rather than focusing on a specific outcome, you start with a hypothesis or a research question. From there, you gather data just like a scientist would. You’re not trying to force a particular result. In fact, if a scientist already knew the outcome, running an experiment would be pointless—it would just be a waste of time and energy.

With this experimental approach, you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen. But you feel curious, so you design your experiment, run it, collect data, and then make informed decisions. Afterward, you can ask yourself: Do I enjoy this? Should I continue down this path? Is it working? Maybe you find that it just needs a few tweaks—perhaps it’s promising but not yet ideal, so you iterate and keep improving it. Or, equally valid, you might discover that you hate it and decide to stop altogether. But now your decision is backed by real data that you’ve collected yourself.

It’s a completely different mental model. The traditional approach is linear, like climbing a ladder. This method, on the other hand, is cyclical—based on repeated cycles of experimentation. You trust that with each cycle, each loop of experimentation, you’ll evolve and grow, even though the path ahead isn’t clearly mapped out.

One thing that really struck me in the book is how experiments remove the pass/fail binary—everything becomes data collection. In my own coaching work, I've found this mindset shift can be transformative for clients. But I've also encountered skepticism, particularly from those who believe success requires ‘locking in’ and grinding toward big goals. How do you address that resistance?

I kind of want to question the assumption that you cannot lock in and go hard on an experiment, if that's what you enjoy.

I think it's worth asking why we're drawn to grinding, but I personally have found joy sometimes in going really hard on something when I'm very focused and excited about the project. I don't think that's necessarily bad in and of itself; you can do that with an experiment.

An experiment is a commitment to curiosity, and in that phrase there's commitment. And so you can say for the next month, every morning I'm going to sit down for an hour, and I'm going to write. And at the end of the experiment I'm going to look at the data I collected, and I'm going to decide whether I want to keep going, whether I want to decrease the scope of the experiment. Maybe one hour was too ambitious. Maybe let's just do 20 min every morning, or that felt so easy that it gave me so much energy. For the rest of the day I felt creative. I had fun. Let's actually ramp it up.

And what's interesting is that when you keep on experimenting like this, you might figure out things in life that you enjoy doing, that other people might look at and say, "How can you do this thing every morning like that? Sounds really hard. You must be grinding so hard and hustling to be able to do this." And you look at them and say, “No, actually, I'm having the best time. I'm really enjoying this.” This is how I feel about my newsletter— a lot of people say, “I can't believe you've managed to send this every single week for the past few years. It must be so hard to stay consistent and committed to this.”

That's not how it feels at all to me. I'm so excited every Thursday when I open my Google Doc and start typing.

So that's the first answer I would give, which is going hard and being hyper-focused on something is not incompatible with experimenting. An experiment is really just about defining an action and repeating it for a set duration, so you can collect enough data that you know how you want to proceed.

And the second part is that experiments can be as big or small as you want them to be. I called my book Tiny Experiments, because we do tend to have a maximalist brain when we want to go with the biggest, most ambitious version of it, but they can be very small as well, and you can play with that, too. That is part of experimenting. And so you can decide to go really hard and then say, actually, you know, I'm going to go for a smaller version or start small and then decide to become more ambitious.

It's your experiment. You decide on the parameters, and these parameters can change.

Your enthusiasm is contagious. In the book, you talk about making a ‘pact’ with yourself about the duration of an experiment, like meditating for 15 minutes daily for 30 days. Is there a minimum length you'd recommend for these experimental periods?

This is highly dependent on the nature of the action that you choose. Obviously, if you're going to write a weekly newsletter and you design your pact, and it's just one week, that is not going to work.

It's inspired by the scientific method, similar to how a scientist decides on the number of trials before they start the experiment. What you want to make sure of is that you're going to complete the experiment and you're going to collect enough data. That's what you should have in mind when you decide on the duration. If you're trying to see if going to bed at the same time every night helps you sleep better, maybe a week or two is enough to start seeing some change, because you're going to implement this every day. You might say, "I'm going to go to bed every evening at the same time for the next two weeks, and then I'm going to look at the data."

So I would really just look at the action itself and try to pick a length that feels reasonable, based on the actual action. Again, keeping in mind that you're not trying to achieve a certain outcome here. The only thing you're trying to do is complete the experiment, collect the data so you can look at it and decide whether you want to keep going, tweak it, or stop it.

I'd like to come back to something you mentioned about finding joy in experiments. In my experience, there's often resistance to the idea that personal growth should be enjoyable—perhaps stemming from America's puritanical relationship with pleasure and our culture of grinding. Have you encountered similar pushback?

I think experiments are fun, and they do make it more fun. But if you want to conduct your experiments very seriously, you can. It is not an intrinsic part of them. What they give you is more freedom in the sense that you're not trying to stick to a rigid plan.

They also open more doors for opportunities that you might not have imagined. Because as I said, you don't know what you don't know. So when you experiment, you will discover new ways of doing things, you will connect with more people, you will learn more about yourself as well, and so you will discover new paths that might not have been part of the realm of possible for you before you started experimenting.

And a lot of people find that to be more fun, which is great. But then some people think that experimenting is this very floaty thing where you just follow your heart and see what happens. But again, it's based on the scientific method, so it's actually pretty structured.

The beauty of designing experiments—especially when you clearly define your parameters—is that it works equally well for people who tend to overthink or stick rigidly to plans. An experiment explicitly says, “This is the thing I’m going to try for this set duration, and afterward I’ll look at the data.” It encourages both curiosity and structure. You get to become a bit more exploratory and curious while still having a framework that they can apply and just trust the process. They know that they're going to grow as long as they complete the experiment and they analyze the data.

One of the parts of the book I really like is when you talked about the cognitive scripts that we run that might prevent us from doing things this way. Can you speak briefly to those?

Cognitive scripts are a fascinating psychological phenomenon that was discovered in the late seventies. There was a seminal study that was conducted in 1979, where researchers discovered that if you place people in similar situations they tend to act in very similar ways.

So, for example, if we go to the doctor, we all know that we sit down in the waiting room and we wait there. Then someone calls our name. We go to the doctor's office, and then they might ask us to undress and have a look at whatever is wrong.

If the doctor walked into the waiting room and told us to get undressed right here in front of everybody, we would feel like something's off.

And that's because we're all following that same script. We all know what the script is supposed to look like, and the steps we're supposed to go through when we go to the doctor.That's very helpful for lots of situations.

The issue is that once they discovered these cognitive scripts, they realized that we were following them in virtually every area of our lives. We follow cognitive scripts when we make decisions in our careers, in our relationships, in books we want to read. We use them everywhere.

They can be very helpful when it comes to making quick decisions. You don't want to overthink everything. Standing in front of a door, you don't need to contemplate how to open it. So having some automatic responses is not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes an issue when we follow these scripts in areas of our life that are quite important and that are going to have an impact on the direction of our life in general.

In the book I recommend noticing those scripts and questioning the ones that are driving some of your most important decisions, and I share three of the most insidious scripts—the ones that a lot of us follow.

The first one is called the sequel script. That's the one where we feel like whatever decision we make today needs to make sense based on the decisions we made in the past. It needs to make sense in terms of having a nice narrative, just like in a sequel movie, where obviously we want the story in the second movie to make sense based on the story from the first movie.

This is the kind of script a lot of people follow when they only explore careers that make sense based on what they studied in university. They don't consider other options at all; it needs to make sense.

The second script is called the crowd pleaser script, that's the one we follow when we put the happiness of other people around us above our own happiness. We want people around us to be happy with our decisions. These people could be our parents or our spouse or our friends or our colleagues. Whatever decisions we make, we want people to feel that it makes sense. ("That's such a good decision, we're proud of you, we're happy for you.")

The last script is the Hollywood script—the one where we chase dramatic impact. It's a very popular script.

This is the one where we make decisions feeling like whatever we do in life needs to be big, it needs to be ambitious, it needs to make an impact.

Because of that, we try to always follow paths that are aligned with what we think our passion should be—something that should be extremely exciting. Because of that, we ignore possibilities where it might be something we're a little bit curious about, but we don't know yet if that's going to be big or if that's going to have a big impact. We don't know yet. So we shut those doors down because we don't feel like that's going to be impactful enough.

I want to ask about another insight from your book: your critique of SMART goals. You point out how they depend on fixed conditions, but someone setting a goal in January 2025 is already facing a dramatically different world than they imagined.

Zooming out, do you see this type of approach replacing some of the traditional planning and strategy that we see in business culture and how most of the white-collar world operates? I'm curious if you thought at all about how adopting this approach might impact the way that we do business and the way that we work together and collaborate.

At a fundamental level, this is an approach that is designed to work with uncertainty. Not necessarily to get rid of it, which is impossible, especially in today's world. But instead, accepting that the conditions are going to change, the players are going to change, the rules are going to change. And so how can you design systems where this is actually welcome and something you can work with?

Obviously, there are areas of a business where maybe you do need to have this long-term planning, and it can be really helpful, but making sure that there's enough space for experimentation, and also making sure there is enough wiggle room if things change to a point where the plans we made actually don't make sense anymore.

A lot of our current systems in business, the reaction that we have is that everybody's panicking when that happens because the systems were not designed to be able to withstand that kind of uncertainty and that kind of change.

If from the get-go, you say, “This is our plan, and this is a best case scenario if nothing changes. But we know things are going to change.” Then you can say, “Here is also a little internal lab of experiments that we're going to keep running on the side, and also allow ourselves to change the plans as we go.” We can be able to tweak things, iterate, or stop something altogether—stop a campaign if it's not working because the situation has changed so much that it's actually not making sense anymore.

By adopting this experimental mindset, whenever things change and there's higher uncertainty, the reaction is not to panic, but to say, “Okay. Everything changed as expected. So how can we experiment and figure out a new way of doing things?”

I'll be curious to watch how your work unfolds and the effect this book has on the world. I am super appreciative of the time and energy you've spent on this topic for all of us!

Thanks so much for having me.

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You can buy Anne-Laure’s book here.

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That’s all for me this time. Next time I’ll be back with some insights from my own latest experiment—deepening my Zen practice and training as a teacher in this ancient tradition.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.